Vows
by attica
Summary: He was breathing hard, as if just being around her was physically taxing. She was so close she breathed in every breath he breathed out. It smelled like mint and fuel and made her throat burn. "No. You aren't worth it," she said, tears pricking her eyes. She took a sharp breath, trying to compose herself. "You aren't worth any of it." AU, DHr. WIP
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer**: I own nothing you recognize! Please don't sue because all you'll be able to get from me is a wholesale package of Top Ramen noodles. I'm a broke college student; I have nothing for you except my dignity (and even that's been compromised).

**Summary**: When Hermione Blackwell's true Muggleborn heritage comes out, her childhood friend, Draco Malfoy, ceases all contact. But when they are both appointed Heads in their seventh year, they quickly learn that unresolved tension doesn't just dissipate over time. It combusts.

**A/N**: Long intro chapter! I doubt the other chapters will be this long but I didn't want to ruin the flow and make things confusing just for the sake of dividing this chapter up. With that said, enjoy! It's going to be quite an angsty ride (you'll find out for yourself in a sec) so don't say I didn't warn you. Also, this is going to be a multi-parter and trust me when I say I am trying to crank out as many chapters before school starts. Eep!

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**Vows**

Power is being told you are not loved and not being destroyed by it.  
- _Madonna_

"It's a big sad, isn't it? To find out you aren't who you thought you were. That you've been living a lie."

The murmurs and whispers weren't new. Even the looks of pity and even, on occasion, loathing and disgust that her peers endeavored very little to hide. People treated her differently now, all shifty and nervous, and she was now learning just how easily affected people could be by secrets – even when the secrets weren't their own.

But now as she saw her face, everywhere, splashed first all over Witch Weekly and then soon every single gossip magazine, she knew better than to call it a secret. It ceased to become something "kept hidden" once people could purchase it for a mere five sickles, therefore cheaply buying a peephole into the most intimate details of her life. She was sick of seeing her own hiding, embarrassed face peering back at her in the hallways and in the great hall. Even worse were the captions pertaining to her mom and dad, accusations of fakery and crude names, fabrication of stories told by "trusted sources" or unnamed "close family friends."

_Wealthy Family Harbors Pureblood Phony!_

"No offense, but I never thought either of you would be more famous than me," Harry said to both she and Ron at breakfast. She'd piled her plate with food she hadn't even touched. She could tell he was trying to seem unaffected by the whole thing. He couldn't even look at her for more than three seconds before having to turn away and distract himself with something else. "It's a bit of a relief to see someone else on the papers, frankly."

He was only trying to be funny. But the look on his face afterwards made it obvious it hadn't come out the way he intended. "Sorry. That was a bit insensitive."

"We'll find out who did this, Hermione," Ron said. His knuckles were white on the table. "I swear it."

From across the way, she spotted Pansy Parkinson smirking at her. Most of all the Slytherin table had decided to buy the paper today – that is, except one. Draco Malfoy sat at his typical seat between his pureblood cronies, wearing his usual expression of boredom and annoyance. She had a silent wish that he would look up at her and meet her eyes. But she already knew – just like how she knew that finding the culprit that had spilled her family's greatest secret would do little to no good – that he wouldn't.

There had been a few times when Draco had broken character, but she knew him well enough to know this would not be one of those times. She knew better than to hope otherwise. Draco Malfoy, her dear childhood friend, would not be surprising her today.

"Don't waste your time, Ron," she muttered. Why had she shown up to breakfast? Her appetite had never shown up. After all, all she'd wanted to do was show them that she wasn't the type to hide away – that pure blood or not, she was still her. It was the Gryffindor in her that insisted she get out of bed, put on a brave face, and show them that their petty whispers and looks couldn't break her. Maybe her name was a lie, but her integrity wasn't.

Ron stared at her, confused. "Aren't you angry, Hermione? I thought you believed in justice."

"I do," she said. "But finding out who did it – it still wouldn't change things, Ron."

She knew the nature of secrets. The more you tried to hide something away, the more you could be sure it would show up to make sure you were sorry for ever thinking the truth could be buried forever.

ooo

She had been sixteen when they'd told her. According to the Department of Unwanted Magical Children, this was the age considered appropriate for revealing the true origin of their birth. She remembered sitting there with her parents looking at her, fearful and worried and sorry, with her mother gripping her hand so tightly – as if she would already start to slip away from them, that very moment. That was the thing with secrets. They had the tendency to change everything, even love. Her mother knew that.

"We don't want this to change anything," her mother was saying. "We love you so much. You are our daughter. You belong with us, always."

She must have looked shocked, but on the inside she couldn't help but feel a little bit relieved. In the most unexpected way, it had made sense. She loved her parents, but something about this life never quite fit. At least now she knew that she wasn't crazy.

When she looked at her parents, she couldn't help but feel a little bit sorry for them. All they'd wanted was a little pure-blooded child. So why had they settled for her? It was a question she wanted answered but one that she didn't want to ask. But as she looked at them, unable to formulate complete sentences and hence deciding to keep quiet until she could, they begged her. "Say something," her mother said.

"Didn't you care? That I wasn't like you?" Pureblooded, she meant. _That I wasn't pureblooded like you_. She didn't look at them when she asked it. She traced circles in the table with her eyes.

Her father shook his head. When she thought herself brave enough, she glanced up. She saw that his face was gentle and real. "We loved you the first moment we saw you."

"After that," her mother said, "there was no turning back."

ooo

She left breakfast early, having been summoned to the Headmaster's office. Professor McGonagall escorted her. Even the Head of Gryffindor House seemed unsettled from the news. She could tell what she was thinking – that it was unnatural for her to seem so composed, so calm, so unaffected. But it was the only way she knew how to cope with it. Lamenting about life and its injustices in public never helped anyone. After all, she'd had a good life. Not all of it had been dishonest.

"There have been worse secrets," her professor tried to reassure her after. Even the portraits and castle ghosts had heard, offering advice and occasionally unwelcome comments. "But I'm afraid people have not yet evolved from gaining simpleton entertainment from salacious gossip."

"But it's not gossip, Professor," she'd said. "It's true."

A quick flash of pity crept through her professor's face. They halted at Dumbledore's entrance. "Be strong, Blackwell. You're a brave girl. You've always been." And then she turned to the portrait and said the secret password.

They entered his office to find her parents sitting down in front of his desk. Her mother quickly rushed over to her, burying her in her arms, apologizing in her ear. First just once, then over and over again. Her father, on the other hand, stood in the corner, looking very serious. He was still in his business robes. He must have dropped everything just to come see her when the news broke.

"Is it still safe for her here?" her mother was asking.

"I have yet to see any serious threat over your daughter staying at Hogwarts," Dumbledore said. "But if the petty whispers escalate, believe us when we say we will take your daughter's safety as first priority."

Her father was looking at her. He was a tall man with jet black hair and muddy brown eyes. He wore such a serious face so well that she was certain she and her mother were the only ones that ever got to see him laugh. She used to love that because it had made her feel special, like they were in on a secret that nobody else knew about.

"Hermione, do you want to stay? We could just as easily find you the best tutors and you continue your studies at home. But this is your choice."

"I want to stay," she said. Her mother squeezed her hand and her father nodded.

"Then she's staying," he sighed. The hard lines of worry on his face only dug themselves in deeper. "For now."

Her mother didn't look quite as convinced. "I can take care of myself," she said to her. "It's all just talk. It'll be old news soon enough."

"I just worry. . ." She was biting her lip, something that Hermione had gotten from her. Not by biology, but perhaps by habit. There was something she was thinking, but not saying. Her mother turned to Dumbledore. "If things get worse, Albus… Hogwarts, I know, has top security but they're not impenetrable."

For some reason, Hermione knew that her mother was no longer just thinking about whether her daughter would be able to weather the storm that was the unveiling of her true Muggle-blooded ancestry. She tried not to let on that she knew what she was talking about. She thought it would just make things harder, if they knew that she knew about the Dark Lord's steady re-accumulation of followers. It would also only prove her mother's point about keeping her at home.

"If that happens," Dumbledore said, grimly, "I'm afraid none of us will be safe, neither at Hogwarts nor in our own homes."

When Dumbledore left them alone to attend to some business, her mother checked again.

"Are you sure this is what you really want?" she asked her, peering into her eyes. "Because you could come home, with us."

"I want to finish up here." She swallowed hard, looking at both her parents. In Dumbledore's office, she had seen a crack in her father's armor. She knew the toll this was taking on the both of them. "I'm sorry you have to go through this."

"We're not," her mother said, firmly. "We don't regret a thing. We love you more than anything in the world, Hermione."

She remembered when they had told her about the real circumstances of her birth. She had been found by the DUMC – Department of Unwanted Magical Children – at the ministry. Their job was to find, collect, and relocate magical children to other families. Normally they weren't allowed to step foot in the Muggle world, but once in every while they would get a sign, or their magic barometer would point to something in the other world. It was in that instance they found her. They called her extraordinary when they could have easily called her other words.

She recognized the rarity of unconditional love, especially in the world they lived in now.

"How are your friends? Harry and Ron?"

"They're fine. Still supportive – loyal to the Gryffindor camaraderie." Even though it had come as a shock to them, too, she knew she could count on them. Matters of blood meant very little to either of them, unlike some of the others. "I could be part troll and neither of them would bat an eyelash."

Her father nodded. "And Draco?"

She shifted her eyes down. "I haven't talked to him yet." _He hasn't even looked at me once_. She wanted to tell them this – or anyone, for that matter – but she knew she couldn't. Saying it would have meant that it mattered. She wasn't ready to admit that yet.

"Everything will be fine," her father told her. He gripped her shoulder, tenderly but firmly, and leant down to kiss her on her forehead. She closed her eyes, trying not to think of how this very statement often ushered in the very worst.

"I love you," she said. She could tell they were the words they needed to hear.

ooo

The first memory she has of him is always triggered by the smell of roses.

She gets catapulted – her first steps into the lush Malfoy garden, with their majestic yet eerie Greek marble statues peeking out like ghosts over the exuberant green. She remembered seeing Draco and his mother for the first time, too, waiting for them at the heart of the garden, standing on flat white stones. Even then she'd thought they bore an uncanny resemblance to the statues they had scattered around, straddling the line between breathtaking lawn décor or tools of intimidation. Pale and cold and graceful. Almost like cousins.

Her mother greeted Narcissa with cordiality, which she returned with barely lukewarm affections. Their husbands worked together now. They'd gone to school together when they were young, but now that her father had moved their family from India, they realized the importance of important families being important together. She was still so young – barely eight – so adult social politics were beyond her. But she did get the feeling that this was more out of obligation than a genuine desire to get to know the Malfoys. It was in the way Mrs. Malfoy's glacier-like eyes flickered over both she and her mother – it reminded her of when she turned in her exams to her tutor and her eyes would narrow when she was assessing her.

The eight-year-old boy in front of her with white-blond hair just like his mother was subtly frowning. He held out his hand. His palms were a little bit pink, and were perhaps the only color she could see on him aside from his steely gray eyes. They were the color of leftover rain puddles on the street. "I'm Draco Lucius Malfoy."

She shook it. His hand was cool and soft. "I'm Hermione."

They settled down and had tea beside their mothers, listening to their small talk and not offering any conversations amongst themselves. Mrs. Malfoy and her mother reminisced on the limited period they'd shared of their girlhood, while Hermione sometimes allowed her eyes to study Draco when he wasn't looking. His pale, smooth skin, the fineness of his blond hair, the regality both he and his mother seemed to exude. They were like living apparitions. There was a strangeness to them, too, that she couldn't really put her finger on.

Finally, they were dismissed. "Go on and get to know each other a bit," Mrs. Malfoy told them, whisking her words with her long, slender fingers. She had stone-colored eyes just like her son. "You can show her around the garden, Draco." And then, to her: "I do think you'll like our garden, Hermione."

Draco didn't look too thrilled about it, but slid out of his seat and began to walk down a cobble path. She silently followed after him, keeping one step behind him. He led her into a maze, stretching out his arm and letting his fingers graze against the bushes that shuddered and recoiled as he walked. When she touched the bushes herself, they seemed to breathe out against her fingers, as if sighing.

"Mother said our fathers work together," he finally said, in a bored drawl.

"They do."

"And that you're from India."

"I am."

"I've read about India. It's hot there, and there are too many Muggles."

She thought hard about it. She had never thought of India as hot, but when she moved here, she couldn't take one step without shivering. And the sun was different here. Not vivid like it was back home, or tinted like mangoes in the summer. The sun here reminded her of the Malfoys: distant and lukewarm at its best. "It seemed like a perfectly nice place to me. There were so many colors everywhere in India. Not like here. It's so gray, like everything's dead."

"You'll get used to it. I'm sure it's better than having to sit in a puddle of your own sweat," he grimaced.

Hermione shook her head, getting a little annoyed with his very incorrect – not to mention condescending – assumptions of India. "That never happened."

He ignored her, and they passed underneath a few suspended vines. There were blood-red flowers attached to them, and they hissed and shook when they got near. "I go to Paris a lot with my mum. She has a sister there."

She'd heard of Paris. Her father often went on business trips there, bringing her back things like ribbons and fancy dresses. He'd always said that he'd take her one day, when he wasn't so busy with the company. "What's it like?"

She caught a glimpse of his haughty smirk when he glanced over his shoulder at her. "Probably nothing like India."

Finally, they reached the center of the maze. There was a large marble fountain, and golden cages with colorful birds around them. The birds began to peer and squawk at them. Draco leaned in close to a cage holding a vibrant yellow and red bird. It bowed its head down, closing its dark beady eyes, as he gently stroked it on the forehead.

"I've heard they've got elephants there. You know, those big gray things with the big ears and the long snout."

She knew of elephants – her father had taken her all the time to see them. She was just surprised he knew what they were. Once, she'd overheard her parents talking about the Malfoys and the company they kept – they hated Muggles and Muggle things – in hushed tones. And now she was here, in the center of the Malfoy labyrinth, with Draco asking her about elephants.

"They do," she answered, keeping her hands behind her back as she slowly inspected all of the birds. Some were asleep, but a few cocked their heads at her with unfamiliarity. "I've ridden one."

"You have?" When he looked at her, she could have sworn he looked envious. Then his pale little face was eclipsed with a familiar taunting smirk. "Well, I've heard they're filthy. Basically just live transportation for Muggle diseases. Awfully stupid things, too."

She pressed her lips together, reaching out to stroke a particular bird. It was white with wings that changed color when it flapped them. "Wrong again," she said, under her breath. She wasn't sure if he heard her. If he did, he didn't show it.

She looked around at all of the creatures they kept in their garden. The Malfoys had practically equipped themselves with their own private zoo. Draco knew them all by name, and warned her which ones were poisonous. She couldn't tell if he did this begrudgingly, because he knew if something were to happen to her his mother wouldn't be too pleased. She was familiar with most of the magical creatures, and observed that most of them were kept here for their beauty. Those with sharp, poisonous teeth or talons had them shaved or had their beaks magically bound. Some of the more dangerous small creatures had magic protection spells to keep them from sniping or biting off fingers.

On a few of the bushes, they had roses as big as her face, blooming ethereally with petals as soft as silk. Even their thorns were large, and almost as long as the span of her finger. She stood in front of them and stared, wondering how many layers there was to a single rose. And whether it was still so beautiful, all stripped down.

She was petting its petals, running her fingertips on the waxy leaves, when she heard him bark from behind her.

"What are you doing?"

She jerked her hand away, but in her surprise it had grazed against one of the thorns. She drew back, wincing. It had sliced the tip of her finger and there was blood quickly seeping from the wound, spotting the ground.

He appeared next to her. "Let me see," he said, grabbing her hand. She watched as he held it close to his face. Then, without warning, he suddenly licked the blood off of her finger.

She pulled her hand back. "What are you doing?"

His expression was unperturbed, matter-of-fact. "I'm cleaning it. Unless you'd rather do it yourself. The way you were staring at it, like you'd never seen blood before. Thought you'd bleed to death before you finally came to your senses."

She stared at her finger. A cloud finally passed overhead, and from a random slant of light, she could make out the glisten that shone on her skin from his saliva. The blood had begun to pool again, leeching out from the cut. It was dark and angry against the pale skin of her throbbing, tingling finger. When she spoke, her confusion showed. "You're not afraid?"

But when she looked up, he was gone. He must have walked away when she had inspected her finger, alarmed by what he had just done.

She had lost him amongst the green and the birds. In the back of her mind, she could not help but take back what she'd said before. Not everything was gray here.

He called out to her from somewhere else, unseen. "Afraid of what?"

ooo

She waited for him to contact her that day. A look in the hallways, a secret owl delivered – a sign of some kind of sympathy, or acknowledgement of the misfortune that had fallen upon her and her family. But in the classes they shared, he never looked her way. When they had to fetch supplies for Potions, he either avoided being near her and when he could not, passed by her without so much as a glance. But even through it all, she dared to hope this was all just a charade. After all, she knew how Lucius was. She knew just how superficial his worries were, and how eager Draco was to please him.

So later on that night, when she sent him an owl to meet her at the Astronomy Tower around midnight and received no response, she thought it was still part of that. Draco was playing a part in public, and when he committed, he was in it completely. She accepted that.

At five to midnight, she still put on her robes and snuck out to the Tower.

She must have waited for twenty minutes when the realization began to sink in. She had done nothing but pace back and forth, staring at the flickering torches, fooling herself into thinking that every passing shadow was him. At forty minutes past, she began to feel incredibly stupid. She imagined how he must have reacted when he got her owl. How he must have thrown his head back and laughed. Had he been alone when he'd ridiculed her naïve belief in the endurance of their friendship, or had he been with the other Slytherins, passing it around like it was some sick trophy? She felt queasy at the words they must have called her.

At forty-five minutes past, she bent over one of the pillars and threw up. She'd eaten nothing all day, so most of it had been stomach acid and dry heaves. Her stomach convulsed and her eyes burned, feeling the hot tears run down her cheeks. Afterwards, she straightened herself up, wiping her mouth on the sleeve of her robe. With a quick flick of her wand, she cleaned up the mess on the floor.

The disappointed, wretched part of her felt like crumpling into a ball in the corner of the room and waiting until morning. Just to be sure. Just to be sure it was really over – because Hermione had never been the kind of person that closed doors only to peek into them again, after the offenses had lost their sting, to try and see if things had changed. Once she closed a door, it remained closed. She banished it to the farthest, darkest corner of her mind. So she wanted to be sure Draco really wanted out. Because once he was out, he was never coming back in.

She waited five more minutes before she left the Astronomy Tower and silently headed back to her dormitory. She snuck back in and was greeted with a symphony of snores from her housemates. She was grateful for the noise; it made for an excellent cover when she went back into bed, curled up into herself, and cried herself to sleep.

ooo

It was the next day when she finally caught his eye. She did so non-intentionally – or maybe not, she wasn't quite sure afterwards. All she knew was that something had drawn her gaze in the corridor and so she'd casually looked up, shifting the weight of her book bag on her shoulder.

It was him. That same pale-eyed stare she had grown so familiar to, one that she could trace backwards in so many of her memories. She thought he'd immediately look away, as if embarrassed, but he didn't. He let his gaze linger for a long yet finite moment, with other students bustling and weaving all around them, before he turned away. But his gray eyes had been empty, like looking into the windows of barren rooms. She watched him: his towering, elegant stature and broad shoulders as he walked away without acknowledging her, as if she wasn't even worth a second glance. The revelation sank heavy inside her like a dead weight yet again, despite having had all night to accept it. Now that her secret was out, she wasn't worth knowing. She was nothing.

There was nothing that could compare to watching someone walk away, of having to watch their figure getting smaller and smaller in the distance, until it was indistinguishable – becoming, in a matter of seconds, the simple holding cell of a stranger, a meaningless body. The expanse of his back became a mirror — a projecting screen — of how her every worry had finally preceded her, and had been waiting for her at the finish line this entire time.

She hated the power that she gave him in that moment. That, by his own conscious design, they would be strangers from then on. But she gave it to him; she resigned to it. Because when he hadn't shown up to the Tower last night, he had sealed things between them. He had let everything change. And now she hated him too much to contend with it.

The eerie thing is how silently it all happened. She'd expected more fanfare. The sound of crashing and groaning foundations and wreckage. But it was a quiet death that she witnessed, ties cut without so much as murmur of grievance. It was so full with its disappointing nothingness that it landed solidly and rottenly at the bottom of her gut.

"Hey."

Someone nudged her, softly. It was Harry, his tie still undone and his collar crumpled.

The look in his eyes told her he had seen everything. She almost couldn't stand it: his expression orchestrated by the softly-muted pity. She thought of the times she'd braved standing up for Draco when Harry and Ron vented about his arrogance, his vileness, or his general disrespect for other human beings. She resented that now he'd made her out to be a liar. But perhaps his worst offense had been that he'd also made her out to be a fool.

"Hey yourself," she said, succeeding in sounding detached, as they started walking towards their first class.

"Everything okay?" His voice was low, almost a murmur. If his question had been a physical person it would have been treading very carefully.

"Of course," she said. She knew how you were supposed to answer these types of questions. She knew you were never supposed to tell the truth. Not that she'd even wanted to. Not that she'd even have the words.

He nodded, pursing his lips. And then, in one fleeting second, it was as if something clicked, and they moved on. Harry began talking about last night's Quidditch practice, and as she laughed at his story, she realized this was what she liked about him: his ability to mime instant amnesia. Just like that, and it was all in the past, buried.

ooo

Hermione's head broke over the water, gasping for breath. Her knowledge of books and practical survival told her that if she didn't get out, she would die of hypothermia within minutes. As she panted, her body still in shock from the freezing water, she looked up and could see where Pansy and her friends had thrown her wand, lodged in a tree branch.

"B-b-bitch," she could barely grit through her teeth, as she began swimming towards the bank. "I n-n-never liked h-her."

She was twelve years old and the moon was out. There were no lights out here on the Parkinson grounds, certainly none by the lake, but she could see the reflection of the moon shifting in the water. It was giant and luminous and had given her sufficient light to be able to see Pansy's cackling face as they had thrown her into the water.

She was almost to the bank, about to pull herself up, when she found a pale palm jutted towards her face. Knowing better than to think Pansy and the girls had come back to make sure she was okay, she looked up.

"Well, you were a big help," she snapped at him. Regardless, she slapped her hand into his, and he pulled, helping her out from the water. She began to shiver instantly, her teeth noisily chattering as she tried to rub her hands up and down her arms to warm up.

"I've known Pansy longer than you have. This is how I know that she wouldn't have stopped until she'd gotten you. It was going to happen, sooner or later," he drawled. He whispered something under his breath, and suddenly, she was dry. A pleasantly warm feeling crept through her skin. It was probably just her blood flowing again.

She glared at him before she went over to the tree Pansy had flung her wand in.

"I'll keep that in mind when somebody feels like accosting you and throwing you into a freezing lake." She reached up on her tiptoes, but still couldn't reach her wand. She began digging her foot into the bark, propping herself up. "They're absolutely evil. Probably all descendants of Grendel. Inbred, too, and everything."

Suddenly, she felt something solid behind her and watched as a long forearm reached up above her and plucked her wand out with ease. She whirled around and snatched it from his fingers. "I have half a mind to hex you for turning into a mere bystander. I could have died!"

"And yet look at you, not even remotely dead," he said, his voice so dry she swore it could have crackled. "Relax, Hermione. They were all just having a bit of fun. Besides, they do it to everyone, just the once."

She stared at him. Under the moonlight, he looked positively ghostly. His hair was a bit disheveled, which was rare, because Draco Malfoy was anything if not meticulous when it came to his hair.

"Not to you," she pointed out, her voice dripping with bitterness.

"That's because she knows I would hex her," he explained. "Without hesitation. Pansy knows better than that."

She rolled her eyes. "All that Pansy knows is that you're her territory. I bet she was hoping to come back later on tonight to find my dead body, blue and frozen, adrift in the lake. She'll be furious if she knew you came to get me."

Pansy had never exactly said it, but it was obvious from the very first moment Hermione had met her. The way she asserted herself and was constantly watching Draco, it was unnerving. Draco, on the other hand, thought nothing of it. That was the trick of it, really. If you pretended not to notice someone was in love with you, you had all the power. If Draco had asked Pansy to willingly fling herself into the water, she would have done so if it meant getting any special acknowledgement from him. But Hermione knew him too well to know that he'd never give it to her. Even as young as he was, the power already meant too much to him.

"Well, then, it's lucky I was never here," he said to her.

She shook her head at him. "I'll never see what she sees in you."

He scoffed. "What? After I just pulled you out of the lake? I may have very well just thwarted your death, Hermione. I'd expect to see a little bit of that Gryffindor gratitude."

"It's Gryffindor _bravery_," she sourly corrected. "It says nothing about gratitude."

"Yes, crying over a toss in the lake. Gryffindor bravery at its finest."

She looked over towards the large shadow looming in the distance. The Parkinson Manor was impressive on its own, but still couldn't quite compare to the Malfoy Manor. They did share one trait: underneath all of the cold elegance, there was something not quite pleasant about them. You always knew when a house was full of secrets. It had something to do with the number of rooms it had and the number of expensive things its owners had amassed. The rooms were for the secrets; the little golden trinkets were to distract anybody from noticing what all of the empty rooms were for.

Even her own family manor had its secrets. A large one that hovered over her some nights, sometimes jolting her awake from a deep sleep, only to find herself staring at a dark nothing.

"My parents were quite disappointed, you know. You getting sorted into Gryffindor."

It was a fact that the Malfoys and all of their close contacts had the uncanny similarity of getting sorted into Slytherin House. Her own father had been sorted in Slytherin; her mum in Ravenclaw. She was the first Gryffindor in their lineage, but her parents had never shown any displeasure in it.

"I think Slytherin House can only accommodate so many," she said, rolling her eyes.

"It's not that," he said. There was something in the way he was looking at her, as if he knew something she didn't. He was still a boy then, his face not quite as angular and rigid as it would be later. His face then was still all smooth lines that crumpled or crinkled easily at the slightest doubt or question; transparent and bendable. Later on that would change, and Hermione didn't know it then – but she would watch it happen. As if over time, he would begin to train himself to pull away from everything. Until one day, he had locked it all away. Even from her.

But they were still twelve, and he had just pulled her out of the lake. She had no way of knowing the future. She was still so naïve then, so young. She shouldn't have been, because Pansy throwing her into the lake was the first sign that things were changing. So was his expression and the way his words had trailed off and his pale little eyebrows furrowed above his slate-gray eyes.

"Besides," she said, "nothing will change. If it did, we wouldn't still be here, would we?"

At the time she sounded so sure of herself, as if it was a fact she had pulled out of her books. Indisputable. It wasn't her fault, really. She was only twelve. She knew nothing about change, and even less about life.

It would be later on, after everything, that she looked back and counted it on her fingers – the symptoms of change; the first signs of a slow but irreparable drift, visible only to someone looking back and searching for the earliest cracks in the stone.

"Don't look so worried, Draco," she teased. "It's not a good look for you."

"I'm not worried," he insisted. "I'm glad, actually. I won't have to feel so guilty when I score higher than you at every single subject. I've been waiting to rub your face in the dirt publicly for years."

"Dream on, Draco," she said. She was already preparing herself, mentally limbering herself up. "How could you possibly beat me if you can't even catch me?"

And then she was off, sprinting down the grass, laughing. She knew that within minutes he would be at her heels. She could hear his footfalls in the grass behind her and knew he was quickly gaining on her. The truth was that she had never been faster than him, not even when they'd been younger. She just liked to see him sweat.

ooo

Hermione was no barbarian, but having heard the next Quidditch match was against Slytherin made her sleep a little bit better at night. She knew how much Quidditch meant to Draco; he practiced it like some people practiced religion. She also knew that every match they lost to Gryffindor sent him into one of his brooding moods. Even back then, after Slytherin would lose a match to her House, he would keep his distance from her. It usually took him a few days to get over it, but she knew better than to bring it up when he finally came around.

She'd overheard his father talking to Draco once, after one of his very first Quidditch games. She had been coming over to congratulate him on not getting maimed or killed – something she constantly worried about for Harry, even now – but as she had been approaching him and his family, she could hear Lucius' clipped words. "I won't accept failure into our family, Draco," he had hissed. In front of him, Draco was nodding, his jaw clenched. Her eyes had traced the single droplet of blood trickling from his forehead that seemed to go unnoticed by everyone else.

She'd understood one thing from the complex life of the Malfoys from what Draco told her: that nothing was what it seemed. That even great opportunities – like getting chosen as Seeker for the Slytherin Quidditch team – could be another strike against you if you failed to live up to expectations. Even then she had only begun to really gauge how much of Draco's life was entirely about making sure his father remained pleased with his only child, the sole heir to the Malfoy name.

But she couldn't see any of that now, walking across the courtyard a few hours before the big match. The Slytherins were laughing over something, like hyenas in the wild. Pansy Parkinson sent her a lewd gesture. Draco Malfoy, meanwhile, was in the center of them: King Hyena himself. When he caught her looking, she saw it. A barely perceptible smirk.

"Any special requests?" Harry asked in a voice only she could hear, as they passed.

"How does it feel, Hermione?" she heard Pansy yell at her. "To know even your Mudblood parents didn't want you? I sent my mum an owl, you know. To make sure the house-elves scrubbed every single thing your filthy phony hands ever touched in my manor. Twice!"

The Slytherins howled. She clenched her fist on the strap of her satchel, looking up at Harry. "Make him bleed," she said.

ooo

It was in the third week of her thirteenth summer when she'd first seen a bloody Draco Malfoy.

They had grown close and casual enough by this time that on lazy summer days they often went to each other's manors. Sometimes they'd practice spells or explore the forbidden section of Lucius' library or even take a trip to Diagon Alley. She hadn't told him she was coming over, because they had passed that formality long ago. She would simply appear at the front door of his manor, one of his house-elves would announce her, and then let her know which room Draco would be expecting her in.

Klaus, the house-elf, told her to go wait in his personal library. "Mr. Draco is busy for now. Klaus suggests Miss wait here for him."

"Wait," she said. "Where is he exactly?"

"He is in the practice room. He should not be too long." Klaus began to laugh, sinister and guttural. "Mr. Draco does not hold up too long."

"What do you mean?" she asked, narrowing her eyes.

"Miss is a guest here. Miss should not be asking questions. Miss might not like the answers," Klaus scolded, before disappearing. She heard the echoes of his eerie laugh down the hall. Knowing Klaus would not be back to check on her, Hermione left the library doors and began walking towards the other wing of the house. Draco had mentioned the practice room before, and she was sure she could find it.

The Manor was filled with hallways upon hallways, each more sinister than the next. There were rarely any windows except for the main part of the house, and Draco's wing. Every time she would reach for a door and try to open it, they were locked. And there was often a screaming portrait beside it to let her know.

Finally, after a bit of sneaking around, a pair of dark wooden doors caught her eye. She was deep enough in the house that everything was silent, like the way things get when you're at the bottom of a cave, and as she approached, she began to hear noises coming from inside the room. Grunts, sometimes, and then muffled thuds. And, on occasion, harsh barks from someone who didn't sound very pleased. She watched as the doors shook, reverberating from a hard impact. What were they doing in there?

And then with a large bang, the doors blew open. Hermione threw herself against the wall, hiding behind a suit of armor. She only got a quick glance before the doors promptly shut, once again locking themselves. Just a second, but it was enough: it was someone lying on the ground. She recognized that blond head anywhere. Even when it was stained almost pink with blood.

After that, everything in the room went still. Hermione began running back to Draco's wing in the manor, and waited in the library for half an hour before he finally joined her. When he did, she watched him, carefully. There were no bruises or cuts. From the way he was acting – his usual pompous self – it didn't seem as if he had just been hexed for the past hour by his father.

"Where were you?" she asked him.

"I was at dueling practice with my father," he drawled, taking a seat on his couch. "He's not happy with the little progress I've made with my spells."

"There's a reason they don't teach us those kinds of spells at school just yet," she said to him. He looked up at her, surprised, not saying anything. "I was curious, and I saw. Just a little. But he shouldn't be hurting you, Draco. There's a line between educational and torture."

Something flashed in his eyes, and his jaw stiffened. "That wing is forbidden. I've told you not to go there. Do you know what my father would have done if he'd seen you?"

She would never admit it, but she got a chill at the thought. "I'm not afraid of Lucius," she said.

"Right," he scoffed. "I'll believe that when you mean it."

She stared at him. "Why is it," she said, "that your Manor is full of secrets? And locked doors? And forbidden wings? What is so terrible that you need an entire place to hide it?"

He leaned his head back on the couch. From his mouth she could make out a tiny breath, a silent sigh. Then his gray eyes were back on her. "My family's been around for ages. If we didn't have secrets, I think I'd worry more."

"I just think," she said, "that we shouldn't have secrets at all."

He snorted at her. "No wonder you were sorted into Gryffindor. Full of idiotic ideals. What next – every Manor should have kitten farm? Nobody thinks that way."

"Maybe that's your problem. You think this is how things should be, and that they're impossible to change. So you just live with it. At least," she said, scowling, getting to her feet, "I dare to think about how things could be better."

He looked at her. "Where are you going?"

"Home," she said. "Have fun with all of your secrets."

He didn't stop her. But as she was leaving, he called out to her. "It's no use thinking that way! Sooner or later, you'll see!"

When she remembers this particular memory, she wants to grab him and shake him and ask why, if he so believed in the necessity of secrets, he would run at the first sign of one of hers. If he could accept his large manor with all its locked doors and ancient secrets, then why couldn't he at least stand in front of her and have the decency to say goodbye?

But she knew the man he'd turned into. Or at least the man he was trying to become; the shoes he had been groomed to fill since birth. She knew exactly what he thought of her now, and that she didn't deserve any of it. Not even a goodbye.

* * *

Please review!


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N:** you guys have probably already figured this out, but there are flashbacks inserted into every chapter, probably always sandwiched by "present day" events. I hope I give enough detail to signify when it's a flashback (basically, anytime Draco's nice)(what an asshole, I know) but just wanted to be clear just in case! And thanks for reading and reviewing! You guys make this gig priceless.

**Chapter 2**

One Year Later

"It's utterly blasphemous that wanker gets to wear that badge. As if he wasn't bad enough without it, prancing around like a self-righteous git before," Ron was muttering, echoing their own thoughts about their new Head Boy. Hermione had only looked up for one second to catch the unholy glint of his badge – enough to catch the smirk he sent her way – before she rolled her eyes and turned back to her friends.

She had spent the latter part of last year trying to forget they had ever been friends – easy enough to do when he played the part of a tyrannical Muggleborn hater so well. But now to be forced together through school civic duty? To be expected to be a team? To be expected to _get along _in the face of a complicated, torrid history? These were among the thoughts that had raced through her mind when she'd received her letter during the summer, congratulating her on her achievements and qualifications as Head Girl. Because what shortly followed the joy and relief of being appointed was the dread that with a Head Girl always came a Head Boy. And she had a good idea of who they had sent that other letter to. That alone was enough to erase the luster of her new position.

"Well, it looks good on _you_, Hermione," Harry said, grinning boyishly. "Just as long as you don't go around telling us what to do."

"It's shiny though. _Too_ shiny. Do they make it that way? Because it hardly encourages peer camaraderie when you've got to stand in front of you and fight the glare," Ron said.

"Shut up Ronald," Ginny piped in. "I think it looks smashing on her. It brings out the color of her eyes."

Ron gagged. "Women."

"Thanks guys, but I've got to meet Dumbledore in his office for the official Heads meeting," she said, already feeling the knot in her stomach as she mentally prepared herself to face Hogwarts' new Head Boy. She hated the thought of having to put up with his pompous smirking in her face all year, but she'd convinced herself that with great responsibility came great challenges. Maybe even impossible ones.

"If you're lucky, maybe Malfoy'll have a freak accident and die between here and Dumbledore's office," Harry suggested, shrugging his shoulders. Ginny snorted. "Hey, it can happen."

"I won't be holding my breath. Pure Evil doesn't just die that easily," she said, as she bid them goodbye for now, heading down the opposite way of the corridor.

"This is it, you know," she heard Ron call out at her, his voice echoing down the hall. "The beginning of the end."

The funny thing is that she couldn't help but think that he was right.

She was the first one to Dumbledore's office, and their eccentric Headmaster gave her a warm welcome as she entered his circular office. He offered her a lemon drop and she declined, and she found herself concentrating on the ticks of the clock as they waited and Dumbledore asked about her summer. Malfoy was late. Of course he was late. He was the sort of boy to think the entire world waited for him. She hated that they lived in a world that they actually did.

Dumbledore, however, didn't say one word about it. She had enormous respect for the great Albus Dumbledore but this she was quite annoyed with. Finally, she spoke up.

"It seems as if our new Head Boy is late. Should we get started and I can fill him in on what he missed later? I know your time is valuable, Headmaster," she said. But in her focus on trying to speak as courteously and unbiased as possible, she hadn't heard the door behind her open.

"Now hold onto your knickers, Blackwell," said a familiar drawl. She tensed. "Already trying to give me the boot, are we? On the first day, no less. You've got to be sly about trying to throw a coup, Head Girl. Though I doubt you'd know anything about that. That's only for the big boys."

His lanky body appeared on the seat next to her. Not even a minute being around him and already she wanted to strangle his pretty little neck. He smirked at her.

She felt her face get hot but firmly held her tongue. Let him look like the instigator. She was too mature to stoop to his level – in front of their Headmaster, no less. Malfoy really had no shame.

"Ah, our two Heads together at last," Dumbledore said. "May I suggest we attempt to tone down the tension and palpable hostility for the sake of inter-House unity? At least around your fellow peers. It is only the first day, of course – energy's running high, everybody's flustered and in quite a hurry. I trust you two will behave accordingly to your positions. That is why you two were appointed Head Boy and Head Girl above everyone else. We here at Hogwarts have utmost faith in you, Miss Blackwell and Mr. Malfoy."

She could hear the threat lying underneath layers of cordiality and professionalism. That if they couldn't fulfill their obligations – which included not killing or maiming each other during the course of the year – they would be dropped from their positions. Even Malfoy, who took the liberty of always looking bored and above it all, was sitting attentively.

"I don't believe I need to go through all of the speeches we reserve for our newly-appointed Heads. You two are serious students. I trust you know that with these badges come duties and obligations that are not to be taken lightly. Do not abuse them but do not make them your life. Study diligently but remember to laugh heartily from time to time. Enjoy yourselves in this last year, Mr. Malfoy and Miss Blackwell. Make it worth remembering."

They were dismissed with a thick student handbook and a parchment containing their itinerary for the first two weeks of school. She had no desire to do any bonding with Malfoy so she went the long way around to their rooms, savoring every moment she'd have clear sight of her sanity, taking her sweet precious time.

"Room's this way, Head Girl," he called out to her. "Or have you forgotten already?"

"I know this castle like the back of my hand," she said, not turning around. "I just don't want to spend a second more hanging around you than I need to."

"Careful, Blackwell. You heard Dumbledore. You might want to take that palpable hostility down a notch before you start an all-out inter-House war."

"I don't see any students around here but us, Malfoy. I can be as hostile as I like. So bugger off," she called over her shoulder.

"My pleasure," he spat out, as she turned the corner. She felt her spine relax when she knew he was gone but still kept her hands clenched into fists, ready to draw her wand at the shortest second's notice.

_You can do this. You can be a professional_, she chanted to herself as she lingered around the staircases. _Whatever you do, don't remember a thing_.

But that was the tricky thing about memories. They had an uncanny ability of popping up despite how far you'd buried them down. Like now, there was a distant voice in her head that reminded her of a time when she would have been pleased to be paired with Malfoy. That aside from Harry and Ron, there wasn't anyone else she would have preferred it to be.

But times changed. She knew this because she'd watched it happen, right in front of her. And she had been left staring after it, helpless, in the dust.

"All you have to do," she breathed to herself, as she stood in front of the entrance to their room, "is not kill him. At least not until we turn our badges in on the last day."

And if that seemed impossible, then she'd just have to take it one day at a time.

ooo

Life was easy enough when it had nothing to do with Head Duties with Draco. It was normal, even – time spent in classes, studying in the library, having meals with Harry and Ron, writing to her mum and dad. It was even surprising how little time she was required to spend with Draco as Heads. They chose to patrol separately and only met up in the beginning and at the end. For the most part, aside from the occasional sneer or smart remark, they stayed out of each other's way. If this was to be how the whole year was going to be, she thanked her stars for it.

And then came the fateful day when Dumbledore summoned the both of them to his office to let them know he had decided to throw a Welcome Back ball on a whim. "I was walking through the corridors the other day and I couldn't help but notice how dreary everything felt. The beginning of the term, as you know, is supposed to be inspiring and crackling with energy. Instead all I can sense is the growing fear over the fate of the Wizarding World and the grimness of the outside world seeping in. It can be quite a hindrance to the appeal of academia." He looked at the both of them, who were sitting silent in bewilderment. "What do you think? I find that dancing to live music has always been a bonafide fix for a dismal ambiance."

"Of course," Hermione found herself saying, albeit confused. "Dancing."

Meanwhile Malfoy beside her was wearing a scowl of disapproval. Then again, it was an expression he wore often. If he wasn't self-satisfied he was dissatisfied with everything around him.

"And you, Mr. Malfoy? I think I can recall you dancing at the Yule Ball in your fourth year. You're an experienced dancer, are you not?"

For a second Hermione remembered that Draco had learned how to dance from his mum, who loved it dearly. She shook that away.

Draco ignored this and said instead, "When, exactly, did you see this ball taking place?"

"In a month's time. I trust that's an adequate time frame for you and Miss Blackwell to finish preparations?"

"A month?" Hermione echoed. "But Professor, we haven't prepared for this at all – there wasn't a word about it in the itinerary—"

"Ah, but that's the beauty of life, Miss Blackwell. It does not always have to be written into the itinerary," he said, his eyes twinkling behind his half-moon spectacles. "Spontaneity! Embrace it. One mustn't always oblige the mundane. And remember: I have the utmost faith in you."

Hermione left Dumbledore's office feeling like her thoughts were in a tangle. Where were they even supposed to begin? She'd have to call a meeting with the Prefects right away. Dumbledore also mentioned live music – but who on earth would they be able to get on a short month's notice?

"Could it be? Our Know-it-all Head Girl ready to call it quits over our simpleton Headmaster fancying a ball just because he felt like trying on his dancing shoes?"

She turned around and glared at him. "If you could even comprehend the amount of work we have set out for us to make this happen in a month, you'd keep your mouth shut. Then again I know your mental processes can be a bit slow, so I'll give you a few minutes for your brain to catch up."

"Oh, my brain's just fine, Blackwell," he said, stepping closer to her. She stiffened but didn't back away, keeping his icy gaze. "But I do think your mouth's a little too quick for its own good. You're lucky I'm a patient man or else you'd have to make do without sniping at everyone for a good few days. Granted, I'm sure the rest of the world would thank me for such a generous deed."

She felt a rush of heat travel through her body. She figured that was just the physical manifestation of her utmost derision for him and his existence. Because as he stood there, sneering at her in all of his cruel regality, she found it hard to believe they had ever been close. Maybe they had never been. Maybe it had all just been a dream. It certainly felt like it – right now, with them glaring at each other with such crackling, palpable hate, their shared childhood must have been a dream. She remembered him in his gardens as he sucked the blood from her cut and she tried to find a semblance of him anywhere in the Draco that had left her to fend for herself when the news of her true birth had broken, just last year. But she couldn't. That Draco didn't exist anymore. It was no use looking. He died the same time the phony pureblood side of her did, and she had spent enough time in mourning.

"You never had the guts to draw your wand at me before," she only said to him. "I highly doubt you'd have mustered up the courage to do so now. You're forgetting something when you talk as if you're holding something above me, Malfoy. You forget that I know you. And that is exactly why I am not and could never be afraid of you."

"Maybe you're not scared of me now," he sneered at her. "But you're a fast learner, aren't you, Blackwell? And it'd bode well for you to learn to fear your superiors quickly."

"Don't make me laugh, Malfoy," she said, before she tore her eyes from his and began to walk away. "If anyone is anyone's superior here, it definitely isn't you. We've got a lot of work to do and I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't waste my time."

Suddenly she felt a hard yank at her elbow, and she stumbled backwards, caught unaware. When she spun around Draco's sneering face was back in her view – so close, in fact, that she could feel his breath sharply grazing her face.

"Get your fucking hand off me," she hissed, her senses reeling from his contact. She could feel her blood pounding hotly everywhere inside her, scrambling her thoughts like spilled marbles across a wooden floor.

"You know who you are?" he snarled at her. "Nobody. A nobody so low they had to go around for the past seventeen years of their life parading around as somebody they weren't with blood they didn't even have."

She felt something jagged and dry appear in her throat but she didn't waver. She forced back the fog that threatened to veil her eyes. "Look at what they've done to you. They've warped you, Malfoy. You think _I'm_ a nobody? Look in the mirror. You're a complete shell. You're just a shadow – totally unoriginal, folding to the whims of someone other than yourself. So go ahead and look down on me. It doesn't bother me one bit, because I can sleep easy at night knowing which one of us really deserves all the pity."

She tried to pull her arm away from his firm grip. "Now let me go or I won't hesitate to hex you straight into the next calendar year," she said lowly.

She couldn't deny the slow fear that was threading through her the more he stayed quiet and close. She could feel the waves of heat burning off of him like a fever. His eyes – formerly fondly remembered from her childhood as an ethereal gray, like brand new knives in sunlight – had grown dark like the sea before a storm, churning and icy. His face was so close and a part of her wanted to just reach out and try to rip the mask off to see if there was anything that she recognized underneath. The Draco that spent days in his family's library with her looking for books before taking them outside to read by his lake. The Draco that had pulled her out and dried her off from the freezing water after Pansy's initiation. The Draco that laughed at her when he always finished first but never turned down a challenge. The Draco that still laughed at simple things that didn't involve sucking out all of the joy in someone else's life. The Draco that wasn't a monster.

"Go ahead," he hissed at her. "Hex me, you tainted Muggle bitch."

His face was stony, impenetrable. It shocked her that he was being so forward with this challenge, but she kept her fingers around her wand in her robes pocket anyway, tempted in every way but paralyzed with indecision.

"Bet you've been waiting for this moment, haven't you, Hermione?" She flinched at the way he said her name – through his teeth like it was something repulsive. "Well here it is. Do it. Live the dream. See for yourself just how sweet it tastes."

He was breathing hard, as if just being around her was physically taxing. She was so close she breathed in every breath he breathed out. It smelled like mint and fuel and made her throat burn.

"No. You aren't worth it," she said, and tears began to prick her eyes. She took a sharp breath, trying to compose herself. "You aren't worth any of it."

He gave her one last look full of disgust before he let her go with such force that she stumbled backwards and had to struggle to maintain her balance.

"Typical. All talk and no backbone," he spat at her. "Next time, if you're going to bark threats, you ought to at least make sure you're up for the job. Mudblood." A slow, infuriating smirk of victory snaked across his face. "See you later then."

She watched him walk away, her hand still fisted around her wand, wanting to both scream and hurl herself at him as well as run the other way, convinced there was no distance far enough from him that she could possibly be. She could be oceans and time differences away and the way he'd looked at her, with such hate that seemed to simmer from the very marrow in his bones, would haunt her forever. _I can't believe this is really you_, her heart achingly wept. _That this is the you, now_.

They had taken such a beautiful flawed boy and turned him into an unfeeling man that talked to her as if he'd never seen the sun rise once in his life. Like he'd been born in darkness. Like being cruel was the only way he knew how to be.

She ran to the abandoned girls' bathroom and dunked her face into the icy water, trying to hold in the sobs that shook her insides. When she looked up, Moaning Myrtle was hovering behind her, sitting leisurely on one of the toilets.

"I know those sounds," she simpered. "Went and got your heart broken by a boy, have you?"

"No," Hermione said, sniffling and trying to compose herself. She looked in the mirror and watched her face – pale, with red-brimmed eyes and her white lips tautly pressed together.

"Now, now," Myrtle said, getting up and floating closer to her. "It's okay, Blackwell. I won't tell a soul. But there's no use denying it. Because it's the truth, isn't it? It's a thirsty little monster, it is, and it won't stay hidden for long." Myrtle giggled. "Though you'd know that better than anyone, wouldn't you, Hermione Blackwell? If that's even your real name."

ooo

The night her parents had sat her down and told her about her true heritage, she'd listened to their reassurances and returned their genuinely affectionate touches. But they also gave her some time alone to process the life-altering news they had just delivered, which she gladly took. She spent some time just sitting in her bedroom, staring out the window, asking the usual questions she reckoned adopted children often wondered. Things about her parents – who they were, whether they were alive, under what circumstances they had given her up, if they were happy, and if they ever wondered about her or missed her. She wondered who she looked like more, her mum or her dad, or whether she was a perfect mix of both. And whether they loved books as much as she did.

In the liberation of knowing, she now also felt the burden of having to hide the truth. She knew the importance of keeping this secret – at least, until she was no longer living with her parents. In her father's business, dealing with the people he dealt with, she knew outing her true identity would be catastrophic. Her family would be excommunicated. Not that her parents really even enjoyed the company they kept with the self-centered snobs of Pureblood High Society, but this had been their life for years. She didn't care about her life – Harry and Ron would understand, and so would the people she genuinely cared about – but the residue her false identity her parents' reputation would be implicated with worried her.

When the walls of Blackwell Manor finally felt as if they were closing in on her, she went outside and settled by the lake to get some air. The sky was blushing and fiery for the sunset. She watched it with a heavy feeling in her chest. When she felt a breeze she closed her eyes and swore she could feel the change happening – just sweeping over her and everything she loved.

"So?" said a familiar drawl behind her. "Figure out the meaning of life yet?"

He appeared on the grass next to her, dressed in a luxury navy sweater and black trousers. His skin was so pale and flawless that as she looked at him she noticed how the sky reflected off of his face just a little bit, making him look pink and even more alive.

"What are you doing here?" she asked him, even though him dropping by at random intervals wasn't exactly unheard of. During the summer it became a habit. Owling to give notification before a visit became tedious and an unnecessary formality when they saw each other at least five times a week.

She almost wanted to tell him to go away – just for a little while, because she needed to think. But a part of her also thought this was good, to have company. Because finding out that you weren't who you thought you were always had a tendency of making you feel sort of unbearably alone.

"Just finished my flying lessons so I thought I'd drop by and see what you were up to," he explained nonchalantly. "Nothing, apparently. Beholding nature's beauty like a sappy poet. I never took you to be the sentimental type, Blackwell."

She managed a halfhearted chortle that fell about as flat as it came out. He must have noticed this because then he just looked at her, more closely this time, before speaking up.

"What's the matter? Run out of books to read again?"

She shook her head. "No. Books I've got plenty of."

"Then what is it? You're looking all pale and somber. It's not a good look on you, honestly. You look a bit ill."

She stayed quiet before taking a breath, turning her face to look at him. There he was, just ripely sixteen just like her, his gray eyes fixed on her in a mildly concerned expression. And it struck her again, just how beautiful he was in this light. Or any light. She'd known him so long it was something that often escaped her, but there were moments when she was able to just look at him and absorb him, this infuriatingly privileged beautiful boy with an amazingly fucked up tyrannical father, that could be both soft and hard at the same time, that was now just straddling the line between man and boy. She could see where the round edges were now just turning into rigid lines, young flesh melting off into mature muscle and stone. His eyes more piercing than they had been before; the color of shivers and rain.

And suddenly her heart felt so inflated just with him sitting next to her and looking increasingly concerned as time ticked by while she said nothing. But she felt so sad, too. Because she couldn't tell him, even though she wanted to. Because she knew that it would change things, and she wanted things not to change more. He wouldn't sit so close. He wouldn't look at her like he cared. Maybe he would have never even showed up.

She wanted to hold out her arms and cling onto everything she loved about this life. Her parents and this lake and the view of the sky from her window and Draco sitting beside her like a friend. She wanted to grab them and hold them close before they could slip past her and leave her to fend for herself all alone.

"Nothing," she finally said, breathing out to release a bit of the pressure that had begun mounting in her lungs. "Just – got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, I suppose."

And he stared at her for one moment more, unconvinced, before he let it go.

"Tell me about your flying lessons," she said, wanting to distract herself from such heavy thoughts. "Any improvements?"

"My trainer says I'm an exceptional flyer," he said, smirking victoriously at her. "Best in the country."

She rolled her eyes. "Your trainer is paid by the hour to lie to you."

Draco chuckled. "All right, maybe not the best. Yet. But I'm well on my way. Ask him yourself. He practically shakes with jealousy every time I ask him how I'm doing." He glanced back at her. "You should come for one lesson, you know. I think you'd like it. Scream like a girl, of course, but once you got the hang of it. . ."

"I'm terrified of heights. And you know it, so stop asking."

"I don't believe you, Hermione. Maybe you're scared, but I think you want to fly. You don't ever look at a bird and think, 'Merlin, if I could fly like that I would never even touch my feet back on the ground, ever?'"

"I quite like having something firm and steady underneath my feet, thanks," she said dryly.

"That's your problem, then. You lack imagination."

"This has nothing to do with imagination. You just want to fly away. I happen to like my life, thank you very much." After she said this she realized just how profound this statement could be, in the afterimage. She liked her life. She didn't want to fly away from it just as much as she didn't want her life to fly away from her.

He looked at her, furrowing his eyebrows. "You think I don't like my life?"

She didn't say anything, only raising one eyebrow at him. He sighed loudly, moving his gaze back up to the sky.

"You learn to be content with your life because you realize it's the only one you're ever going to have," he said. "Flying away – it's just a dream. It's never going to happen. That's why it's so nice to think of."

She watched him, closely. She could see it. Draco riding away on his broom to the eternal sunset. Poetic, sure, but plausible enough. "You could do it, you know. If you wanted."

He laughed. "Yeah, right." He turned to her, his face half-joking and half-serious. "Would you come with me?"

"Me?" she snorted. "On a broom? With you?"

"I'm an exceptional flyer. Just ask my trainer. Though I'm actually better than he lets on, jealous prick. What I mean is I'd never let you fall. Not by accident, anyway."

"It's not even about that. Even if I trusted you to help keep me in the air," she said, shaking her head, "I would never make it. The moment I looked down I'd be done for."

"It's settled, then," he said, smirking at her. "The moment you decide to get over your ridiculous fear of flying is the moment I'll get on my sodding broom and fly far away from reality." He held out his hand. "Now shake on it like a man, Blackwell."

She laughed but shook it anyway. His hand was cool and smooth and larger now, easily engulfing hers. They held on firmly before letting go. "You know this is never going to happen."

"Statistically, never is just another number," he said to her, drawing his hand back and grinning at her. "It's just as good as one."

* * *

Please review! It never goes out of style.


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N: **as always, thanks for reading, my cherubs! Am I the luckiest fanfic writer or what!**  
**

**Chapter 3**

"A ball? That's exciting, isn't it?" Ginny said to her after the Prefects meeting. She had been named head of the decorations committee, which she quickly committed to, despite already having her extracurriculars busy with Quidditch. "It has been sort of dreary around here. Depressing, almost, and I can't even come up with a reason why. But starting off the year with a ball would be a brilliant idea to liven things up!"

"Brilliant," Hermione admitted, "but exhausting. He sprung this up on us last-minute. Malfoy and I were completely blindsided."

"Well, I have faith in you," her friend said, and Hermione held back the urge to roll her eyes. What was with the sudden frequency of that phrase this year? It was getting to be awfully annoying and increasingly less inspiring. "How is that going, by the way? With Malfoy."

Ginny considered herself Hermione's closest female friend, and was therefore obliged to ask about the things Harry and Ron felt they couldn't. Not that Hermione minded – it's just that she rarely talked about what happened between her and Draco after sixth year. She denied it mattered but it was always so personal, even the parts that still stung, that she shut down every time anybody asked her about it. So they stopped asking. Except Ginny, of course, who at least knew a thing or two about tact.

"Just swimmingly, as you might have observed during the meeting," she said dryly, as they turned the corner.

"I thought I was the only one! It was like the beginning of the new Ice Age," Ginny commented, though carefully. "Swear I thought I saw icicles forming on the ceiling. If the meeting went any longer I thought I'd lose my toes to frostbite."

"I'm sure you weren't the only one." She should have been more concerned about the way she and Malfoy looked to the Prefects, but right now she barely had the energy to even think about trying to pretend to be chummy. The effects from their last explosive face-off still lingered with her, and every time she so much as saw his face she felt that deep-seated anger boiling up again. But she was perfectly civil – not warm, but civil. Maybe even to a fault.

"All right, enough talk about wankers. Let's talk about gentlemanly prospects for your date to the ball. You have thought about it, haven't you?" When Hermione gave her a dry look, Ginny nodded. "That's okay, I thought just as much. But now at least I've introduced the concept. Things can only look up from here."

"Finding a date for this godforsaken ball," Hermione said, "is the last thing on my mind. I'm more focused on how on God's green earth I'm going to survive the next month working with Malfoy."

"Well," grinned Ginny. "At least we know Malfoy's out."

ooo

She caught a glimpse of his strikingly blond hair as she sat alone in her corner, pouring herself over her Herbology project. She didn't even look up.

"If you're here to ask me to the Yule Ball, you're too late," she said, as she dipped her quill into her ink bottle. "Viktor's already asked me."

"Well you didn't need to know Divination to reckon that, would you?" he drawled, leaning up against the shelf with his arms coolly crossed.

"Just as much as I have no need for Divination to know that you've probably asked some pretty girl with half a brain to be your date," she said, smirking up at him. "Though you've got to wonder how it is they can have so much hair and keep their neck balanced when they've got nothing substantial in their skulls. Just another one of God's little mysteries, I guess."

He almost hesitated. "Pansy asked me."

Hermione stared at him, watching his face. "And you finally gave in? You poor sod."

"She cornered me, Blackwell."

"She's cornered you before and that's never stopped you from stomping all over her false hopes with your pretentious Italian leather boots."

He only shrugged. "It's just the once. I figure, why not? She'll look smashing in a dress and my father will finally get off my back about her. At least for a few months."

Hermione reached out her arm and poked him. He flinched in surprise. "Bloody hell! What was that for?"

"Just checking to see if you'd gone soft," she said. "And if you must know, you have." Draco rolled his eyes, taking one of her spare quills and running one fingertip down the side. "You don't even like her, Draco. I know this because I've had to sit and hear you whine about how your father thinks your ideal match is Pansy and how it sickens you some nights you want to fling yourself off your terrace."

"This," he said to her, "is just a pot calling a tea kettle black. You don't like Viktor either, Miss High and Mighty."

"That's different. He's actually a gentleman. Pansy's the devil's meaner older sister reincarnated."

"A gentleman with a unibrow and breath that smells like dehydrated meat," he deadpanned. "And those were your own words, I believe."

"With a sparkling, kind personality underneath," she finished. "Which is what matters. You know this. Which is why you loathe Pansy. And now you're going to have to spend the entire night with her, which will be your own doing, so I don't feel sorry for you at all."

"Good. I don't need you feeling sorry for me, Blackwell, because I'll be the one in hysterics when he's stepping all over your toes with his clubfeet."

She shrugged. "It's nothing a little shielding charm won't fix. And there's no spell big enough to make Pansy disappear without anyone else noticing." She paused, thinking. "However grateful they may be."

Draco set down her quill, making sure it laid straight and parallel to her other spare quill. His attention to detail never ceased to amaze her. He was frowning. "Looks like we're just going to have to go to the ball with less-than-ideal partners then."

She sighed dramatically. "How are we going to live through something as important and life-changing as the Yule Ball?"

He shook his head at her, as if she was the impossible one here. "I would have asked you, you know. Insufferable as you are. If you'd only waited."

"And I would've said yes, if only you'd hurried the bloody hell up." She couldn't deny the truth behind this, either. She'd been hoping he'd ask her just so they wouldn't have to muck about with all the unnecessary fuss that came with finding a date for the ball, but Viktor had beat him to the punch. She had no real reason to believe that Draco would even ask her, aside from her own practical hopes. If she'd waited for him she might have been left waiting forever. Dateless. Not that she'd mind going alone, but why be dateless when she didn't have to be in the first place?

He began to walk out of her aisle. "Next time, don't go around saying yes too quickly to the first Neanderthal that asks you to be his date. You don't want to seem too desperate. Might ruin your reputation."

"Remind me that next time there's a cataclysmic event that involves dancing so I remember to turn you down the first time you ask me."

"Dream on, Hermione," he called out, a smirk in his voice, as he disappeared from her view.

She stared after him for a moment, smiling to herself, before getting back to work. "Merlin, I can't stand him," she muttered to herself, as she grabbed her quill.

ooo

"I've been owling every single wizarding band I can think of," she was saying, "but they're all booked until next year." She looked at them. "You guys can't play any instruments, can you?"

"Not only can I not play an instrument," Harry said, as Dean shook his head in response, "I literally repel them. They actually combust upon the sight of me coming."

"Great," Hermione sighed. "Just great."

"Sorry, but isn't Malfoy supposed to be helping you with all this ball stuff?" Harry asked, chewing on a chicken leg. "Or are we just supposed to pretend he doesn't exist?"

"If only pretending was enough. But he's in charge of the other things, like sending out invitations and making sure Hogwarts alumni as well as its the other sponsors come. And," she said, picking up an asparagus from his plate and examining it before taking a bite, "I'd rather not talk to him."

"That sounds like a winning plan. Not talking to the Head Boy all year," Harry said dryly, but stopped when he saw the look on her face. "Blimey, he did something, didn't he?"

"Like what?" Ron said, finally joining them for dinner. He was out of breath, having clearly just run over from class. "Like trip over his massive ego?"

"No," Hermione said, shaking her head. "He didn't do anything. Aside from be himself."

"Which is a capital offense all in itself," Ginny frowned.

"Anyway," Hermione sighed, slinging her satchel bag over her shoulder, "I better go. I've got loads of homework to do after spending all afternoon reading polite rejection letters from wizarding bands all over the United Kingdom. I even reached out to one Swedish band, and even they rejected me. In Swedish."

"I'm sure you'll have better luck looking for a date, though," Ginny offered. "I've already overheard a few of the Prefect boys talking about you."

Ron looked up, his mouth already full. "Date? Who said anything about a date?" He glared at Hermione. "You never said we had to have a date for this sodding ball!"

Hermione shook her head. "Go alone if you'd like, Ronald. I really don't care much about dates right now, either," she said, giving Ginny a pointed look, before heading out of the Great Hall.

"It can't hurt to have a bit of fun, Hermione! That's all!" Ginny called out.

Hermione sighed to herself, closing her eyes. Fun. Fun, to her, right now, was finding a quiet corner in the library and getting her work done, all the while pretending they had chosen another Head Boy instead, one that didn't make her shiver with rage every time he did so much as step into the same room as her. But it comforted her at least a little to know the feeling was probably mutual.

She found her usual spot in the library and began to strategize her plan of attack for tonight. She had more than enough work to keep her busy for at least the next four hours before she had to go check up on the Prefects on tonight's patrol. She laid out her spare quills and ink bottles, opened up her books, and got to work.

It was towards the end of her Ancient Runes essay when she'd heard talking on the other side of the shelf. It was quiet enough that she could easily tune it out, but then she thought she'd heard Draco's name being mentioned. She paused, listening closely, before dotting the end of her sentence with a period and looking up.

"…Not sure what's going on with him, really. Even Blaise's been asking around. Says he's been acting weird and disappearing a lot. I told him it's probably just Heads business but now that he's brought it up I'm finding it a bit suspicious."

"I heard he'd gotten initiated over summer. Is it true?" said a familiar husky voice. Hermione recognized her to be Millicent Bullstrode, who had never really understood the idea of whispering.

"Quiet Millie! Bloody hell," said the harsh whisper, which Hermione suspected to be none other than Pansy Parkinson. It surprised her enough that they were actually in the library, let alone the fact that they had even known where it was. "But that's the rumor. I tried asking him about it on the train but he straight up deflected me. Which gives me even more reason to believe he did. They've just got to be secretive about it, and all. Even to us. They say Dumbledore's on the lookout for anyone suspicious in Hogwarts. With Draco as Head Boy and all, he'll be watching him the closest. Blaise says that's why he was chosen, you know. So that Dumbledore could keep a close eye on him, what with his father a known Death Eater and all."

Hermione closed her eyes, taking a silent but shuddering breath. Even with their hostile relations now, it was still hard on her to remember the changes that had happened to Malfoy over their sixth year. Even before her news had come out, she'd had the suspicion that things had only gotten worse for him. She could feel it when she was around him; see it on him when he was across the room. His face only got harder and sharper, his eyes only darker and more dangerous. In the last few weeks before her secret was exposed, she had felt the shadow that both followed and preceded him. It was so strong that it became almost tangible and made her want to reach out and reassure him that everything was going to be okay.

But after she had been outed, she had been expelled from knowing even the vaguest details of his life. She had become an outsider and was only privileged to the rumors everyone had heard and passed on, to the physical minutiae she could only observe with her eyes. She sat there and watched everything happen. Sat and watched the darkness of his life swallow him up. She watched him grow colder and didn't do a thing about it because she hated him too much.

And now he was a rumored Death Eater, or at least one in pending, and she had to share a common room with him and work with him on a daily basis. Her, the girl that paraded around as a Pureblood when she was anything but. Her, one-half of Harry Potter's confidants. Her, the girl that was probably the first on the Dark Lord's list of filthy, undeserving Mudbloods to finally rid the Wizarding World of in one fell swoop.

Suddenly she felt sick. She stood up and quietly ran out of her aisle, heading towards the toilets. In the bathroom she stuck her head inside the toilet and retched until all that was left inside her were her guts, and even those didn't feel completely intact. When she finally got off her shaky knees to clean herself up at the sink, she felt woozy. She felt a million things. Shame, rage, sadness, disgust, agony, and so many other emotions that made her want to submerge herself in a sinkful of ice water and never come back up.

She spent a few minutes in the loo, composing herself, before she returned to her place in the library. By then, Pansy and Millicent had disappeared. Ironically, so had most of her focus. She glanced at her watch and sighed, sitting back in her chair. It was twenty minutes until she was supposed to head out and check on the Prefects, but she couldn't stand a minute more indoors. She quickly packed her things and started towards the Astronomy Tower.

ooo

It was her fifth year and she couldn't sleep. She laid in bed, staring up at her ceiling, listening to the synchronized snores of her Housemates. Then, finally, she pulled on a jumper, grabbed her wand, and snuck out of the dormitories.

The thing about being a rule-follower was that you also had to be diligent about attaining the skills to make sure you didn't get caught once you eventually did break the rules. She had made sure of this, so she was able to make it to the Astronomy Tower without running into a single soul. Once she was there, however, she realized that she wasn't the only one who escaped to the Astronomy Tower every now and then for a bit of peace and quiet.

"Draco," she said, surprised and out of breath. He turned around and gave her the same look of cool curiosity. "I take it you're up to no good."

"Of course," he drawled. "How couldn't I be? Standing in a dark tower, in my pajamas, all alone. How sinister of me."

She rolled her eyes and came closer to him, tucking her wand away. The dim torches in the tower did very little to illuminate much beyond the corridors, but the moon was full and giant tonight, which gave her clear view of his face. He looked troubled, like he was wrestling with something. Something heavy.

"What's the matter?" she asked, gently.

"I just couldn't sleep," he said, curtly. "Blaise snores like a congested dragon."

"You could always just cast a silencing charm," she suggested. "I do it sometimes when it gets unbearable. You'd be surprised whose a snorer. Some of the prettiest girls, actually," she said, with a hint of pride. "Some of the ones you'd never even suspect sound remarkably like blowhorns in the dead of the night."

He shook his head, his face drawing back down in thought. "It's not just that. You know it isn't."

She watched him. "No, I can't say I really do."

He looked at her. His eyes were like pearls when the moonlight struck them in just the right way. She almost felt her breath catch. "Do you know who you are?"

She blinked, confused. "Who I am?"

"You know," he said, already beginning to sound frustrated. "Who you are. Not your name or any of that fluff, but on the inside. What you want. Out of life, and all of that nonsense."

"I'd hardly call it nonsense when you're getting so worked up about it," she scoffed.

He gave her a hard, firm look, turning to her completely. "It's important, isn't it? Knowing that about yourself. Asking those questions and having the answers when the time comes."

She nodded, swallowing hard. She lowered her voice to a gentle tone. "Is this about your father, Draco?"

She knew all about Lucius. How could she not? She had learned to attune her senses to feel whenever he was near. She saw the effect he had on his son – his son, this naïve, loving boy that wanted nothing more than his father's validation. His permission. His love. She almost wished she'd never done so – made herself aware – because the truth was so ugly, so disheartening about the Malfoys. That everything had a price. Even a father's love. That in the extravagant beauty of their lives there was a terrible evil and tragedy rotting underneath their blood red roses in eternal bloom.

He turned away, and she found that pulsing knot in his jaw again as he gritted his teeth. "No. Yes. Not just him. Everyone."

"You don't have to listen to him, or anyone," she went on, quietly. "This is your life. He can't tell you otherwise. He may be your father, Draco, but that's all he is. He doesn't deserve anything else from you. Do what you want. Do what you think is right."

He met her eyes again. They were shiny, hard. Searching. Conflicted. "But what if I don't know? What if I can't decide? What if – I feel myself torn in so many directions that half the time I can't even justify what I'm doing with a real reason?"

His voice broke in the middle of it, and she felt her hand instinctively rise up, delicately touching his jaw.

"Have faith in yourself, Draco. I do. I trust you."

And she did. Because even in the inching darkness and the maliciousness of his father she saw him, or at least the essence of him, a lingering flame of light that stubbornly refused to be blown out. She trusted him and she wanted to trust him more, at the same time. Not only him, but the universe. To be careful with him, because he was more fragile than he looked. And to hold him up when he needed the help, because standing up to your destiny was harder than anybody could ever imagine. Especially for a boy that everybody had already written off. The truth was that nobody had faith in Draco Malfoy, not even then. It still remained one of his life's most tragic truths to this day.

"Some nights I catch glimpses of my future," he told her. "But then I wake up, and it's okay. But what if I don't? What happens when the day comes and I can't wake up, because it's real?"

She shook her head. "That," she told him, feeling the sudden weight in her own throat, "is never going to happen."

He scoffed softly. "And you know everything, don't you? Hermione Blackwell, the girl with all the answers. Insufferable Know-It-All."

"Exactly," she said proudly, and he only shook his head, chuckling under his breath. "So trust me. And don't write yourself off yet." She held her hand out. "Now shake on it like a man, Malfoy."

He looked at her for a second, as if hesitating, but did it anyway. They shook on it and that, she'd naively told herself then, sealed it. His fate. He would rise above it. He would be a better man than his father could ever hope to be. He would get his answers.

ooo

She spent half an hour checking on the Prefects and making sure they were where they needed to be. It was an unnecessary formality of being a Head – she and Malfoy were required to take turns doing it – and they hardly caught any of the Prefects breaking the rules. At least, not when they knew she was coming. She did a quick twenty-minute sweep before she started heading up to her room, still thinking about what she had overheard in the library. And as she did, she realized how angry she was becoming, at how much she wanted to march right up to him and beat some sense into him with her fists and demand an explanation, because damn it if she didn't deserve one! Damn it if she didn't deserve a lot of things from him, an explanation in the very least.

Maybe it seemed silly to her now but back then, even with the pressures from his father, she'd never once thought he'd give in. She'd always somehow believed that once it was possible, he would break away from the lifestyle of darkness he'd grown up with. That he'd want more for himself than a life of servitude to anyone.

_That was then, Hermione_, she firmly thought to herself, feeling the sudden tightness in her throat as she reflected on these ancient ideas of Draco she'd once kept close and dear. _Things have changed since then, remember?_

This lingered with her as she looked up towards the entrance to their common room. She suddenly froze. The door was ajar and against it laid a heap of school robes on the floor, with its long legs sprawled out. In the dim light she could make out the soles of its shoes. Her heart stopped, her mind reeling in shock. She knew those Italian leather shoes anywhere.

"Just came limping in an hour ago," one of the portraits gruffly informed her, having just been woken up from her gasp. "Didn't even make it past the door."

* * *

a strategically-placed cliff-hanger deserves a review, don't you think? :c)


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter 4**

He was breathing, which was a good sign. When she turned him over she saw that he had a minor flesh wound bleeding from the side of his head but nothing that appeared too life-threatening. With her panic subdued, she levitated him and stood there for a moment, trying to decide whether to bring him to the hospital wing straight away or keep him in the common room until he was conscious enough to tell her what happened.

"Well, get on with it!" the portrait barked at her. "It'd be a bit suspicious if somebody found you out standing here with his floating body, don't you think, Head Girl?"

She glared at him but directed Draco's body into the common room as she heard the portrait door shut firmly behind them. She set him gently on one of the couches, and she inched closer to inspect him, her bottom lip clenched between her teeth.

She reached out to sweep his hair – stained slightly pink from some blood – from his face but hesitated, watching him closely, expecting him to open his eyes any moment now and reach out to accost her. Was it possible that she was actually scared of him? Or was she just scared of being this close to him again, after having spent so long trying not to be? The fact that she had these questions pulsing through her mind, along with the obligatory "What happened?" and "Is he all right?" made her think twice about being in the room at all. It occurred to her that she could just leave him here until morning, but her civic duty as Head Girl prevented her from being so forcibly careless. Even if it was for the sake of her own self-preservation.

Slowly and cautiously she finally did it, as gently and quickly as she could. She swept his damp, fine hair from his face and for a second she just looked at him. She might have held her breath as she did so, she didn't really know. But she allowed herself to look at him in a way she scarcely now ever let herself. Her eyes traced every detail of his face like they were carving them into her brain, and she came to the same conclusion she'd always had, even when they were younger. That he was so fucking beautiful but the world had ripped his soul from him as if it had never belonged to him in the first place, as if he was just some temporary soul surrogate. Knowing that – unable to go a day forgetting it – his beauty disappointed her. It actually grieved her. Because now he was just a shell, washed up and lost.

She magically cleaned and patched up his head wound, being very careful not to actually touch him. But as she kneeled beside him on the couch, hearing his soft breaths and watching his still, peaceful face, she could feel the niggling curiosity and dread. Her eyes trailed down to his forearm and lingered there, as if trying to see through the cotton that covered it. She looked back at his face, checking to see if he was still unconscious, before she began to lightly scrunch his sleeve up his arm with the tip of her wand. She silently braced herself to see the hideous, unholy symbol that would officially let her know that he had given himself to the other side as part of a fucked up twist of his short privileged Pureblood life, as the pale ivory of his skin and the bluish veins that throbbed underneath them were slowly becoming exposed –

Suddenly Draco's arm shot out, catching her wrist in a vice grip, Hermione barely noticing as her wand clattered to the floor and the sleeve fell back down like the curtain after the show, hiding whatever she might have seen. Her own breath was sucked back into her body with such force that it caught her off guard and almost pushed her backwards – and would have, had he not physically seized her.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" he demanded, his face drawn down into a threatening sneer. He was so close she could feel him panting on her face, like a beautiful bloodthirsty albino bull ready to gore its victim.

Her heart was beating so hard she swore the room had begun to throb with it.

"I was just—you were passed out—" she stammered, her own tongue fumbling like a foreign object in her mouth.

"What's this? Head Girl Blackwell stumbling over her own words?" he said. "I see that smart little Muggle mouth of yours has its limits." His eyes moved across her face, as if taking her in – her flared nostrils, her quivering lips, her flushed cheeks, her wide but shiny eyes. She felt her stomach coil at the slow smirk that began to snake its way across his pale, sweaty face. "What's this? Do I scare you, Mudblood?"

She tried to pull her wrist back but he only held it tighter, trying not to wince as his fingernails dug into the thin skin of her wrist. _Don't let him see through you_, a voice echoed in her mind. _Don't let him win_. "Not a chance, you lowly little snake," she spat. "Now let me go before I make you."

"That's too bad," he said lowly. "Thought you'd finally learned your lesson. But maybe it's high time you learned the hard way, hm? Let's see, what shall our first lesson be – oh, how about this? _Don't you ever fucking touch me_," he said, his voice deepening into a growl. "Got it, you dirty little Gryffindor wench?"

It happened before she'd even realized she'd decided to. She felt the harsh impact of her palm hitting the side of his cheek so hard his face snapped the other way. Her hand stung tenderly and his porcelain skin began to glow an angry red in the shape of her hand. There. A brand he could finally be proud of.

"Clearly," he snarled, "you have a death wish."

Apparently she did because she swung her hand back yet again and hit him with even more staggering force. She could hear her own breaths, heavy and jagged to match the rhythm of her pulse in her ears. But still, twice wasn't enough because she did it again, and again, and again until the air stung the tender, livid skin of her palm like electricity. In front of her, her hand became a raging red blur – the blood having come up to the surface, boiling underneath her skin.

She could almost feel the heat coming out of her eyes. She was trembling now; no longer able to keep still and silent and professional and _act like nothing happened_. Her bones quivered with the thousand questions she'd bottled up inside of her and she hoped that if she hit him enough they would topple out of her and he would _get it. _She hoped even more that if she hit him enough this stupid, infuriating mask of his would come off, that maybe on some impossible, paper-thin chance he would come stumbling out of the darkness and back to her, begging for her forgiveness over and over again like a prayer.

She rose her hand one more time to hit him again, but he caught her other wrist squarely in his palm with the resounding smack of skin hitting skin. His eyes were dark and stormy and his right cheek was so tender she almost wondered if it would bruise tomorrow. Inside, she both hated and praised herself for letting him get to her like this. Everything inside her sung from the adrenaline and long awaited vengeance, but it was a sad song, wasn't it? Nowadays they always were.

"Are you?" she rasped, suddenly parched, staring into his face, as if she looked hard enough she could make out the answers. She shook from her desperation. She didn't care if he saw it; physically, he was keeping her together but already she was crumbling from the weight of the situation, the pulsing multitude of unanswered questions that had hovered over her for so long, rooted in her nightmares and pulling her away from any and all happy moments. "Are the rumors true? Are you one of them?"

Something flashed across his stoic, statuesque face. Something quick and sad and painful but gone before she could reach out and tell it to stay. "You must have forgotten who you are, Blackwell, to think I could ever be tempted to answer any of your questions."

"No, I know exactly who I am," she said to him, almost shouting. "I'm not the one who's clearly lost here. I'm not the one on the verge of selling his soul." She said "on the verge" to be hopeful. She said it even though every bit of her was collapsing because every bit of her knew better but was trying not to.

"What gets me, Blackwell, is that you still think you know me. You don't. You don't know a single bloody thing about me," he was saying to her, with eyes like murder but his voice rising to accompany the agony she could finally hear coming at her in waves as if she had been deaf to it this entire time. "It sickens me when you still look at me with that look of shock and hurt in your eyes like a pathetic wounded animal. Like you're surprised – like what's happening to you is so fucking unimaginable. But it's not, is it? Nothing is. It's happening. And you have nobody else to blame but yourself."

She shook her head. "How do you do it, Draco?" she whispered. "Lie to yourself. You do it so magnificently."

His nostrils flared. "Don't," he said darkly, "call me that."

"You hate it, don't you?" she hissed, something hot and acidic gurgling up her throat. She didn't know whether it was stillborn laughter or just vomit, but she swallowed it down just the same. "Seeing me, hearing my voice – hell, even the knowledge that I'm here, just one measly room away from you, sleeping, breathing, _existing_. Well, let me tell you something, _Draco_. Just because you decided to cut me out of your life because I didn't fit the mold of some outdated, fucking delusional concept your racist, heartless father has drilled into your brain – just because you decided I would no longer be worth a single nice thought or passing glance doesn't mean I get to stop existing. It doesn't work that way. You can't just throw me away when you feel like it. So go ahead and hate me like you've proved you're so keen on doing. Spit at me, tell me again just how much lower beneath you I really am, and spend every night trying to forget. But let me tell you right now – I'm not going anywhere. I'm going to stay right here. I'm going to be a reminder of everything you wish you could erase. I'm going to torture you, just by breathing. And I'm going to enjoy every second of it."

He didn't say a word – didn't need to, as his face said volumes. Beautiful and so damn angry she could almost feel her bone marrow turning into vapor but like something was slowly dying inside of him, too. She knew the feeling because she'd been decaying since the day he looked at her as if she was nothing but a stranger.

"Go ahead," she said, bracing herself, reading his mind. "Hit me."

The old Draco would never, and she knew this. The old Draco would never lay a hand on her. Then again, the old Draco would have never given his life to the Dark cause. The old Draco might as well have been a myth that she told herself at night, fantastical and unreal and everything she wished was true about the world.

But he didn't move.

"No," he said to her, his voice cold and dead. "You aren't even worth that."

And just like that, she watched the stone veil fall back down over his eyes. And she knew her time – if she'd even had any at all – was up. He was gone.

He let her go, thrusting her down to the floor, her palms burning as they grazed the carpet. She looked up at him. She wanted to laugh, almost. He fit the image, damn it if he didn't. An angel of darkness.

"Don't come near me again," he said. "I don't need your tainted Muggle hands doing me any favors."

"Gladly," she replied, wishing she'd left him there to rot.

She wished she could have been the one to walk away first, this time. To have him look after her and feel the humiliating sting of her victory. But he was already up and walking to his room while she felt as if every muscle in her body had been petrified and nailed to the floor. She could only let out the painful, mounting breath once she heard the door to his room slam behind him. And then, collecting herself from the carpet, she went into her own room, where she silently allowed herself to fall apart.

ooo

"Would you let him snog you?"

It was fourth year and she and Draco were out by the lake, studying. It was a bizarrely sunny day and they hadn't met up by design but coincidence. During the school term they didn't spend much time together, which he blamed on her constant company of Harry and Ron, to which she then responded that she hardly ever saw him outside of classes because he was usually off trying to find some poor girl's tonsils in the deep recesses of her mouth. He had an affinity for physical intimacy with any girl with a pretty face and a decent pair of legs, which wasn't anything new. He wasn't even ashamed about it. He just smirked and shrugged it off like any red-blooded male actively satiating his raging hormones.

She looked up at him from her textbook, squinting from the sun. "What?"

"You know, Viktor the Bulgarian Boulder. You're important to him, which is why you were chosen for the underwater challenge – which is a classic move, by the way. And he's asked you to the Yule Ball, to which you have tastelessly replied yes. So if he wanted to snog you, would you let him?"

"I don't know," she said, honestly. "I haven't really thought about it."

He picked up a flat stone and skipped it across the lake, the ripples in the water causing the Giant Squid to raise one tentacle and wave. "It doesn't require much thought, Blackwell. This isn't Advanced Arithmancy. It's not quite as serious of an ordeal as you think."

"I understand _that_." She rolled her eyes at him. "But forgive me if I'm not currently on the prowl for halfwits to snog, thank you very much. It's not exactly the most urgent piece of business in my life at the moment."

He scoffed, faking a look of offense. "I'll have you know, the girls I've entertained are at least in the top ten percent of their class," he said. She gave him such a dry look it almost crackled. "All right, twenty-five."

"Unlike you," she went on, pointedly, "I've got my priorities sorted."

Draco shook his head. "You're nuts, you know that? It's a simple question. And here you are, getting defensive, attacking my priorities. I thought we were friends, Blackwell."

She stared at him, narrowing her eyes. "Why do you want to know, anyway?"

He shrugged, smiling mischievously. "Pure human curiosity, that's all. Is that such a crime?" She scoffed, shaking her head, as she went back to reading her Potions book. He lapsed into silence, even though she could still clearly feel his eyes on her. Finally, she looked up, unable to focus, knowing that he was staring at her.

"What?" she said, exasperatedly. "What is it?"

"Do you want me to teach you?"

She just looked at him for a very long moment before bursting into laughter. She laughed so hard that other students in need of their vitamin D who had also taken to socializing or studying by the lake looked over, curious as to what Draco Malfoy could have said to put her in such hysterics. She laughed so hard she had to wipe tears from the corners from her eyes. When she finally opened her eyes wide enough to see him, standing there and looking increasingly irritated at her idea of humor, she just laughed even more.

"Laugh all you want, I'm just trying to be a good friend," he said to her. When he noticed the other students looking, he told them all to sod off.

"You can be a good friend without offering to stick your tongue in my mouth, thanks," she said, finally composing herself. Her stomach was literally sore from laughing so much. "Besides, I don't even want to think about how many girls you've snogged. Probably enough to fill a small European country. Look accomplished all you want, it's still disgusting."

"What can I say? Practice makes perfect."

"Yeah, and I'm sure the hours you've put into perfecting the art of snogging have been quite the drag," she said. "Take it from me: there's nothing more unromantic than the thought of the queue of girls before you that have now left their own DNA in a bloke's mouth." She shuddered.

He stared at her, as if in disbelief. "Bloody hell, you've never been kissed, have you? Not even once."

She felt her cheeks flush. "No, and I'd like to keep it that way. You're not going to mortify me out of wanting my first kiss to be nothing short of perfect."

Draco tipped his head back and laughed. "That," he drawled, "is such a girl thing to say."

She shrugged. "Good thing I'm a girl then." When he sat back down next to her, on the grass, he was still chuckling under his breath. In the sun his eyes were light and sparkling. In fact, if she looked close enough, she could make out the faintest trace of blue in them.

"There's no harm in waiting, you know," she told him. "Life isn't a race. Finishing first and having all of those notches in your belt isn't what it's about. There are some things actually worth waiting for."

He looked genuinely amused by her seriousness. "Snogging is recreational, Blackwell. It's not a sodding marriage. It's supposed to be fun and enjoyable, not something profound and once-in-a-lifetime. It's not poetry. It's the ancient exchange of swapping spit."

"I know that. But I'm choosing to wait, until it's with the person I fancy and the timing is right. Which can be decided either in advance or at the moment itself. And neither you nor anybody is going to sway me from that," she said, definitively, turning back to her book.

"Then I hope that when you finally do get your first snog, that it was worth waiting for," he said, faintly smiling at her. "I'll even give you that first edition _Hogwarts: A History_ I have in my family's library. Because that's the thing with first kisses, Hermione – they hardly ever are. Worth the wait, I mean."

"How would you know," she asked him, both condescendingly and curiously, "if you've never waited?"

He sighed, resting his head on his hands as he lay on his back. "Let's just say I've yet to have that moment where I've regretted not waiting. Lately all of the girls I've snogged have been sub-par. I can't even tell them apart anymore. It's like they're all blurring together in this sad blob of barely adequate snogmates."

"I don't know how you do it. You know, get up in the morning, and face the monstrosities and hardships you do every day," she said, rolling her eyes and turning back to her homework. "That's quite the uncharmed life you're living, Draco. I feel sorry for you."

"With the gall you have mocking other people, you'd think you were born snogging someone," he said to her, incredulous. Then he pressed his lips together, furrowing his brows. "You've got some dirt on your cheek, you know."

"Where?" she said, blindly rubbing her cheek with her right hand. "Did I get it?"

"No, it's – lower, just a little bit – no, to the right," he said, before he sat up, reached out, and rubbed it away himself. Hermione stayed completely still, watching him, feeling a slight tingle down her spine as his fingertips gently wiped her cheek. A small breeze passed and she felt goosebumps ripple across her skin.

When he was done, he didn't draw back away like she thought he would. His eyes flickered over her face, as if in thought. He was holding back a smile.

"What if I kissed you, right now?" he said, quietly.

She could feel the others around them, watching. She felt warmth flood her cheeks but didn't move away. "You wouldn't dare."

He was silent for one moment, as if contemplating, before he finally retrieved his hand. "You're right," he said, collapsing on his back, and she felt her heart sigh – in relief, in disappointment, she wasn't exactly sure. "Wouldn't want to steal your delusional perfect first kiss. That'd be terrible of me. Couldn't possibly imagine having to live with myself after I'd robbed you of such a vital human experience."

Her mouth dry, she swallowed. "Exactly."

And underneath the bright sun, making his eyes twinkle like precious stones in dazzling light, he smiled, just for her. Like a friend. Or maybe something more.

And for a fleeting, heart-throbbing second, she couldn't remember for the life of her why sharing her first kiss with him, this boy she had known all her life and could make her laugh to the point of tears without even meaning to, would be so terrible at all.

"Well, if you change your mind, you virginal, uppity Gryffindor," he said, smirking. "I'll be here."

She ducked to hide her face back in her book, not wanting him to see that maybe she already had.

* * *

Thanks for reading and please review! Super short chapter this time around - if we _have_ to go around pointing fingers, I'd have to point it towards school because it is back to slowly sucking out my soul... I'll do better for you guys next time, I promise.


	5. Chapter 5

**A/N: **Thanks for the reads and reviews, darlings!**  
**

**Chapter 5**

"Hermione? Can I talk to you for a sec?"

Hermione caught Ginny's eyes pointed at something behind her, a telltale smile tugging on the corner of her lips. She rolled her eyes, knowing this was possibly the last thing she needed at the moment. Behind Ginny she could see Malfoy leaning against the doorway, talking to one of his Slytherin Prefects but his eyes narrowed in her direction. She quickly glanced away, feeling her cheeks faintly burning from the memory of their last encounter. She could still feel the hate simmering behind her eyes. He had left a nice little bruise around her wrist that she'd had to cover up with a concealment charm for a few days before it had finally begun to fade.

She turned around to see one of the Prefects, Cormac McLaggen, smirking at her. A few Prefects had hung around to socialize after the meeting, but most were now beginning to filter out of the room, eager to start their weekend. She was only hoping Ginny would stay so that she wouldn't be left alone with him, but those hopes were quickly dashed when she watched her housemate pass behind McLaggen, twiddling her fingers at her with a secret smile on her face. "Told you," she mouthed, before exiting.

"Yes, McLaggen? Have you got a question about the meeting?" she said, trying to be professional despite the way he leaned towards her against the podium. She dreaded ever having to deal with McLaggen. She had often caught the looks he would shoot her during their Prefect meetings and the blatant sexual come-ons of the licking of his lips. While it had initially flustered her, she had learned by this time to mentally superimpose an image of a dog over his face during the meetings.

"Not about the meeting, _per se_," he said, slowly. Hermione watched as he reached out his hand and began to run his fingers up and down her tie.

She cleared her throat and snatched it out of his fingers, which only made him chuckle under his breath. She fought the instinct to roll her eyes. "Let's have it then. I'm sure you've got a very busy weekend waiting for you, hm?"

"Well, I was just wondering if somebody's already asked you to the ball," he said, flashing her a very confident smile. "And if not, I'd like to be the first in line. I've had my eye on you, you know. You've evolved into a very. . ." Hermione shuddered at the way his eyes trailed over her body, feeling as if a swarm of spiders had suddenly begun crawling all over her. "Comely young woman."

She tried not to let on too much how repulsed she was by his sentiments. "Thanks for the offer, but I think I'll keep my options open."

"Oh come on, Blackwell, don't be such a prude, will you?" he said, jokingly, even though she could make out the faint annoyance in his eyes. "It's not a big deal. We'll show up, we'll dance, we'll have a good time, and I'll keep my hands to myself." He smirked, licking his lips. "That's _if_ you haven't changed your mind by the end of the ball. Minds do tend to change, you know."

"McLaggen, I'm flattered," she said, as she began packing up her things, "but I'm sorry. I'm standing by what I said." She left out the part where she would rather spend the night handcuffed to a Banshee than spend it with him.

His eyes drew downwards, a darker expression eclipsing his face. "Blackwell, I'd like to remind you that even with your heralded position as Head Girl, with your recent scandal, it isn't likely another bloke is going to want to taint himself with the association." He let out a sharp sigh, pasting back on that condescending smile. "So, gentleman that I am, I'll ask again and you can really answer me this time."

Hermione stared at him, having stopped putting away her materials, in complete shock of his audacity and immense ego. But before her patience could officially run out and she could tell him to do her a favor and bugger off, possibly forever, a tall figure suddenly appeared beside her.

"McLaggen, sod off," the familiar drawl snapped. "We've got Heads business to discuss and I'm tired of looking at your pompous little face."

Cormac's eyes flashed as he turned his face towards Malfoy. Hermione should have been enraptured to witness this episode of Battle of the Hogwarts Alpha Males, but quite frankly it was something that happened all too often and she had no one to root for here, as she detested them both.

"I'll '_sod off'_ when I'm done talking to Blackwell, Malfoy," he said. "So go sit on your privileged ass and stare at the ceiling or something. Do whatever it is you Malfoys do. Fat lot of nothing, from what I've heard."

Hermione rolled her eyes, clearly sensing where this was heading – which was downhill, and fast. She turned to McLaggen. "Cormac, my answer is still no. I'm sure some other girl would be honored to hold your attentions for the evening and I'm even betting she's probably waiting for you to ask her right now," she said, her voice calm and measured at this outlandish lie. "Now can you just leave so Malfoy and I can talk Heads business?"

Cormac sent them both a scowl, stepping back. "That's just as well, then. You two deserve each other anyway," he spat, before turning around and walking out the door.

Hermione sighed, shaking her head, continuing on with putting away her things. "Wanker." She closed her satchel before looking up at Malfoy. "Speaking of wankers. What Heads business was it you needed to discuss?"

"Your incompetence, Blackwell," he icily said to her. "As you've yet to secure a band for the ball. A completely simple task that you seem to be failing at."

She glared at him, slipping her bag strap onto her shoulder. "I'm working on it, Malfoy. A month's notice isn't exactly the ideal time frame most wizarding bands want to hear."

"A month," he said, "was two weeks ago. If you hadn't been able to get a band two weeks ago, what makes you think your chances have bettered now?" His steely eyes flickered over her, disgusted. "It seems that Mudblood brain of yours is failing you, Blackwell."

She felt her grip tightening on the strap, the leather cutting into her palm. "I'll get the sodding band, Malfoy." Even if it meant having to conjure one out of thin air, she couldn't let him lord this over her. "Don't worry your pretty little blond head."

"Forget it." His upper lip curled. "I'm done watching you scramble like a useless little peasant. I'll find the band. Can't have us both looking inept all because of you."

Her hand itched to reach out and give him another good smack. It was so tempting that the urge practically clouded over her brain, chasing away whatever verbal retaliation she might have had ready. She hated that he could still get her worked up like this and inflate something as simple and trivial as obtaining a wizarding band for one night of back-to-school frivolity into something that might ruin her reputation as Head Girl. How she wished for indifference, for the ability to look at him as if he were just vapor, instead of the blinding rage he did such a good job of summoning. That was the problem with hating someone this much. In such high doses, it incapacitated you.

"Try as you might, Muggle, you can't rise above your blood," he hissed at her. "So I'd quit now if I were you."

"You're not going to bully me out of being Head Girl, Malfoy," she said, as evenly as she could muster. She was not going to raise her voice. She was not going to let on how it still hurt. She was going to kill him with her maturity. "Not with your lowly insults and schemes. I earned this position and you can try to fuck with me as much as you'd like, I'm never stepping down."

He smirked at her. "We'll see about that, now, won't we?"

Hermione, trying to seem unfazed, stepped past him. "Now if that's all, I have more productive things to do with my time than to stand here and tolerate you." With a firm look, she brushed past him and began heading towards the door.

Before she could cross it, he called out to her. "Wait."

She debated on whether to give him another second of her time after he had just spent minutes using her as a verbal punching bag. But there was something in his voice – something different from the hostile tones he had proved himself such a master of. Reminiscent of a time past, even. She felt a tug in her chest she wasn't sure she wanted to feel.

She looked back at him.

She only caught a flicker of it before she saw the slow, taunting smirk that crushed her fleeting, miniscule hope. "Welcome to hell."

Without a spiteful hand gesture, she left the room, silently reprimanding herself. Sometimes she could swear she saw the faintest trace of the old Draco, like a fragment of an old picture between frames in transition. She told herself she was just imagining it, that it all conformed to the sadistic personality of human nature and memory. That nothing was left of the him that she knew, and to permit even the slightest hope against it was like wishing the dead back to life. Futile. Torture. Stupid.

"Hell," she scoffed to herself, her knuckles still white on her shoulder. "You'd think it'd at least be a bit warmer here."

ooo

She had been catching up on some reading on her bed when she'd seen it it – something moving outside her window. She dog-eared her page, put her book down, crossed over and swept the heavy curtains aside. She was not surprised by the smirking figure hovering outside her window as she unlatched them and opened them wide, letting in the warm sun and fresh air.

His blond hair was tousled from the breeze and his cheeks were rosy from having flown there from his manor. "Thought we could go out for a ride," he said to her.

She crossed her arms on her chest, shaking her head. "Dream on, Draco."

"Come on, you coward."

"I've got some reading to do."

"You've always got some bloody reading to do," he said, still leisurely resting on his broom. "That's all you do. You read and write letters and have tea and _occasionally_ go on walks by the lake. You are literally the most boring person I've ever known."

She stared at him in mock offense before finally smirking. "Then why is it you're at my window and nobody else's?" she asked, raising one eyebrow.

"Because everyone else is already out, _having fun_," he drawled. "And Father kept me in for half the day practicing spells. Come on, Hermione. It's a beautiful day and it's waiting to be taken advantage of. Not just waiting. Screaming. _Begging_."

She laughed nervously. "I don't think so."

He lapsed into silence and just looked at her, pensively. "What's it going to take, hm, Blackwell? To get you to live a little?"

"Getting on a broom and potentially falling to my death isn't the most appropriate metaphor for living life," she said. "I can have a very fulfilling life without ever having to mount a broom, thank you very much."

"I disagree. I think you need to face your fears."

"I have plenty of time to do that," she said dismissively.

"What if you didn't? What if, without you knowing it, this would be the last and only time you will ever get a chance to fly on a broom with me and behold the beauty of your family's ancestral land?"

"Then I shall cry my eyes out. After," she said, picking up her book, "I finish my reading. Besides, you know I don't do What Ifs. I think they're an incredible waste of time."

He resigned, shaking his head. "You are bloody impossible. Truly, it's tragic."

"And you're a spoiled brat with a complex."

He shrugged. "I've been called worse." He looked back out to the open sky before back at her, as if making a decision. He sighed. "Well, step out of the way, then," he said impatiently.

She narrowed her eyes at him. "What exactly are you planning to do?"

"I'm going to climb through your window, what else?" he said exasperatedly. "Honestly, I thought you were supposed to be smart."

"I thought you wanted to go flying," she said. "If you're just going to stay here and sulk and complain about how you could be out _there_, flying, then I'd rather you just stay out there get it out of your system. I wasn't kidding about the reading I need to do."

"I know you too well to even remotely consider you making a joke about _reading_," he said, ducking his head and climbing through her window. He stood up a little too early and hit the back of his head against the pane, causing the window to quiver. "Bloody hell," he said, gingerly rubbing the spot. "I think you need a bigger window."

"I think you need to start using _actual doors_."

He leaned his broomstick against the wall and then headed straight for her bed, taking a seat on the edge and picking up one of her books, before casually flipping through it. "I've read this one. His sister dies at the end."

Hermione ignored him. That was one of his favorite pastimes: spoiling books for her. Often he'd ask her what book she was reading just so he could start and finish it before her just so he could spoil it.

"Besides, I think we're getting a bit too old for you to be climbing through my window at all hours of the day," she said, a bit hesitantly. "What with you being betrothed and all."

He put down the book, looking at her. His easy expression was gone. "So you've heard."

"I overheard my parents talking about it the other night. I'm not all that surprised, actually. It's an ancient tradition but one that lots of Pureblood families still insist on keeping. I was just shocked why you hadn't told me yet," she said matter-of-factly, shrugging.

"I was going to, eventually," he sighed, furrowing his brow.

She sat down next to him on her bed, trying to silently gauge whether he was sad about this recent development or not. She knew – perhaps even more than she preferred to – that he liked to fool around with girls but shockingly didn't have a clue what he thought about marriage. It just never had any reason to come up before. "Have you met her?"

"Once, when I was eight. She cried a lot," he said, as if trying to remember, "and loved to eat cake. But then her family moved to France. They wanted her to go to Beauxbatons."

She tried to imagine her, this girl she did not know, who would become Draco Malfoy's future wife. She wondered what she looked like, and what sort of girl she was. She wondered whether she cried at the news of her betrothal or had been rather proud of whom her parents had deliberated for her husband. Without knowing it, she felt a slight pang of envy.

"Does she know?"

"Know what?"

"That you're a heartless wizard that dotes on every airheaded pair of legs that walks by?"

He smirked at her, putting his hands behind his head and lying down. "She may have heard a thing or two."

"You're utterly shameless," she said, shaking her head, before falling into a thoughtful silence. "I wonder what she's like. I mean, her being literate would be a plus. Or having any sort of opinion about anything besides hair and large diamonds."

"Go ahead and mock her," he drawled. "It might seem outdated to you, but betrothals are an easy and logical solution. My father's been educating me on the skilled art form of finding a wife since I could walk and it's proved tedious and ridiculous. I'd rather just have it out of the way."

"So I suppose love is out of the question, then," she snorted.

He turned to her, as if confused. Then his gray eyes narrowed, like he was trying very hard to read her. "Love? You don't really believe in that, do you?" he scoffed.

For some reason he seemed completely aghast at the possibility she might actually believe in something as conventional and clichéd as love.

"Of course I do," she said, a bit defensive. "Why shouldn't I?"

"It's like this, Hermione," he said. "People say they love each other – confess it to the ends of the world, write the same sodding poem in different versions, build manors catering to their every desire – and then they go around and treat each other like they can't stand each other. It's completely dishonest. An entire myth built off of empty promises, and people eat it up. They think it's real. Then when they aren't looking, it destroys them, from the inside."

She just stared at him. He looked completely serious, as if he truly believed in what he'd just told her. For this, she actually felt sorry for him. In a way, she realized that she wasn't all that surprised he'd come out of all this thinking love was just some grand con on the human race. She wished otherwise, but she knew him and his life too well to pretend.

"Harry was saved by love," she said, softly. "How could I not possibly believe?"

His lips moved, but they only formed the faintest ghost of a smile. "Maybe that's the difference between you and me," he said. "You're gullible. And naïve."

She rolled her eyes, but lay down next to him, on her back. She counted the folds in her velvet canopy. He was breathing quietly, his expression sober and thoughtful, just looking at her.

"You know, the funny thing is," he said, his voice a low tremor, making the room feel fuzzy, "for some reason, I always thought I'd marry you. My parents mentioned it once or twice, a few years ago." He moved his gaze away from her, staring up at her canopy, his mouth pressing into a sad smile. "The suggestion didn't send me into a screaming fit of terror like I thought it would."

She laughed to herself, even though she could feel her heart rate quicken. At his comment, she felt something form at the base of her throat. Something sour and dense and remarkably close to longing. "That makes one of us then."

"Oh come on," he said, turning back to her. "You'd be thrilled to be my betrothed. Admit it. Admit you're bitter my parents didn't choose you."

She met his eyes, and for a second, really wondered. But Hermione, knowing the futile nature of wondering, didn't let her imagination take her too far. "I could never marry for anything other than love."

He shifted his eyes away again. "How inconvenient for you." There was a slight telltale edge to his voice. "Be sure to tell me how that goes. You know how I love a good laugh."

She was silent for a moment. "I know it's not going to be easy. I realize it might never even happen," she admitted.

At this, he opened his mouth, as if wanting to say something, but then closed it again. His eyes were dark and from the open window she could see that the sun was slowly setting, casting long shadows everywhere in her room, stretching and bleeding into each other. For a few seconds, everything around them went perfectly still. "For you," he finally said, as if the words were heavy and carefully deliberated, "it will."

She felt herself blush, subconsciously holding her breath, before he abruptly sat up and in long-legged strides made his way across her room, towards the window. She got up, too.

"I better go then. If I want to get a good fly in before supper," he said.

"All right. Be careful," she said, as he grabbed his broom and placed it outside the window, where it floated, waiting. "I'm sure your betrothed wouldn't want to be walking down the aisle to a vegetable." She had meant this to be funny but neither of them laughed, and instead all she could feel was the lame smile that rested awkwardly on her cheeks and the odd, strained silence that stretched in between them.

He nodded. "I'll see you later," he said, before climbing out of her window and getting on his broom. She waved and watched him from her window as he disappeared into the distance.

Years later she would replay this memory and realize he was right. It would be the last time she would ever get a chance to go out for a ride with Draco Malfoy on his broom, and she hadn't even considered it. She knew that now. That things had a way of slipping out from beneath you, and you would never even know you missed them until they were gone.

ooo

Hermione decided to meet up with her friends in Hogsmeade that Saturday night because come the end of her hellish week, she actually had something to celebrate. She revealed this to them as she requested a toast inside the Three Broomsticks, holding up an owl she had received from a popular wizarding band, the Wailing Banshees, that had formerly rejected her on her request for them to come and play at Hogwarts' beginning of term ball. Their original gig had been canceled so they were now able to commit to her event. She was so relieved; she was even considering sending a copy to Malfoy when she got back to her room later on that night, just to shove his arrogant little face in it.

"To Hermione," Harry shouted, over the cacophony of the crowded, bustling pub. "The most ridiculously dedicated Head Girl in the history of Hogwarts!"

"Hear hear!" everyone shouted, including herself, as they noisily toasted their overflowing mugs of butterbeer. She laughed heartily as she wiped the foam from her mouth. Sitting there, being with her friends, knowing that everything was set for Hogwarts' first big event of the year – this was undoubtedly the best she'd felt in a very long time. She allowed herself to just bask in the afterglow of her success. She knew that if she had to see Malfoy tomorrow, chances were that this feeling would be very short-lived.

"You never told us whatever happened when McLaggen asked you to the ball," Ginny mentioned, and all eyes were diverted back to her.

"_McLaggen_ asked you?" Ron asked in disbelief, butterbeer dribbling down his chin.

"Don't worry, Ron, when I turned him down I passed along that you might be interested," she said sarcastically, reaching over for a chip.

"You turned him down?" Ginny echoed.

"Of course I did," she said. "Don't act so scandalized, Gin. He's utterly vile. You know that."

She looked disappointed. "I was hoping there would be more to him than that. You know, that there might be a nicer, cuddlier, and less sexually-harrassing interior." When everybody at their table gave her a dry look, she threw up her hands. "What? Can't a girl have a little bit of faith in humanity? Honestly, you lot are so jaded," she grumbled.

"Anyway," Hermione said, turning to the boys, "have any of you got dates yet?"

"I'm going with Parvati – just asked her today," Dean grinned.

"I asked Harry," Ginny replied.

"I said yes," confirmed Harry.

"I asked Hannah Abbott," said Seamus, "who said no. Then I asked Susan Bones, who said yes. So I'm going with Susan."

"Aren't Hannah and Susan best mates?" Ginny asked suspiciously.

"Practically sisters," Seamus nodded, and everybody gave out a groan of disapproval. "You can imagine that didn't go over too well. Look, judge me all you want, but at least I'm not dateless like Ronnykins over here," he teased, nudging Ron.

"Who says I'm dateless?" Ron said. "I'm going with Hermione. Obviously."

Hermione was taken aback by this sudden announcement. "_Obviously_?"

"You know. Everybody's got a date except you and me, so it's only natural we go together," he explained. At this, Hermione heard a mixture of sharp intakes of breath and groans from their group.

"Oy, well done, Ron," said Neville. "Have you ever considered writing a book called 'How to Repel Every Female in Two Sentences or Less'? Because you've already got pages of material."

"As flattered as I am, I don't think that's going to happen," Hermione laughed. Normally she would have been insulted by Ron's assuming nature and lack of any tact whatsoever, but this seemed like such a tiny blow compared to how her week had gone. This was barely even a dent in her armor compared to her troubles with Malfoy. "Sorry, Ron, but I'm not going to be anyone's default date. I think I've got a bit more integrity than that."

"Who are you going to ask then?"

She shrugged. "I'm not completely opposed to going alone. I'm sure I can steal a few dances here and there to save me from dying of total boredom."

As all of the boys in their group began suggesting a few dateless girls they had heard of to Ron, Ginny leaned in close to Hermione. "Has Malfoy got a date?"

"I wouldn't doubt it," she answered, taking a sip of her butterbeer. She tried not to think of the past girls he had taken to the Hogwarts balls (all of whom she had vocally disapproved of). But most of all, she tried not to think of how she had almost been one of them at one point in her life.

"I heard he asked Astoria Greengrass. Apparently Pansy was furious about it," Ginny said conversationally. "She's got a bit of a complex, that Pansy."

Hermione snorted, looking up at her friend. "You have no idea," she said, "how right you are, Ginny."

After a few hours of high-spirited communing, they headed back to Hogwarts to make curfew. She spent some time in the Gryffindor dormitories with Ginny because the other girls were out, and partially because she wasn't looking forward to being back anywhere near Malfoy. Even with her recent success of finally acquiring a band, it was quickly losing its luster, knowing that as the ball crept closer she would have to be working with him more than ever.

"Hermione," Ginny said gently, sitting on Parvati's bed and braiding her long hair, "do you ever miss him? Malfoy, I mean. You don't have to answer if you don't want to, but I see the looks you get sometimes. Like it hurts just to be around him."

Hermione was silent for a moment. She could feel herself getting pulled into the dark hole of her memories from her former life as a daughter of Pureblood society. Even now, thinking of it, she felt something bile and hot inch up her throat and felt a wave of conflicting, aching emotions. "Sometimes I feel like it was all just a dream, and it was only last year that I finally woke up from it."

"But you two were friends. Proper friends," she said. "It had to have been real."

Hermione smiled. She smiled because for a time she had told herself that, too, over and over again until the words eventually lost their meaning. She learned that the more you tell yourself something happened, the more you start to doubt it ever did.

"Time has this funny way of making you doubt your own memories," she said softly.

Hermione had left by the time the rest of the Gryffindor girls had finally come up for bed. She headed up to the Heads rooms, fumbling with the letter in her pocket. She fantasized about knocking on Malfoy's door and shoving it down his throat as some kind of retribution for how aggressively he had tried to get her to quit – not just from their previous Prefects meeting, but ever since they'd arrived here at school.

She walked through the portrait hole, still absentmindedly playing with the letter in her hands, before she stopped, mid-step. She turned her head back towards Malfoy's door, which had been left slightly ajar. She stood there for a moment, watching the door, as if expecting him to walk through at any moment.

"Malfoy?" she called out, walking towards his room. Something felt off to her. Draco had always been a stickler about privacy – there wasn't even the smallest chance he would have purposely left his door open. "Malfoy, are you here?"

She reached out, nudging the door open. A little at first, and then all the way. His room was dark, and she could make out something blue and glowing in the corner. It had an irregular shape, as if it had been toppled and spilled over. She stared at it, taking a steadying breath. She knew exactly what it was. It was a pensieve.

She began to walk over to it, now completely careless about the potentially huge problem she'd have in her hands if he found her in there, when she felt something heavy against her foot. She froze, nearly tripping over it. She tapped it again. It was warm and solid, and it was on the floor.

"_Lumos maxima_," she whispered, drawing her wand, illuminating the room. She looked down at what was crumpled at her feet, her heart becoming still. "Fuck," she hissed. "Not again." She got down on her knees, rolling him over. He was unconscious and she could make out the clumps of dried blood on his lower lip, as if he had been biting down on it too hard for too long.

"Malfoy," she said, softly slapping his face. She could hear him breathing but his pulse was faint. "Malfoy, come on. Wake up." After a few minutes, when it was clear he wasn't going to, she dragged his body to his bed, trying every spell she could think of to bring him back to consciousness. She paced at his bedside, trying to figure out what to do, feeling her panic start to rise. "I should go to Dumbledore," she whispered to herself. "This is the second time I've found him like this. Clearly there's something going on."

But there was a part of her that was resisting. The part of her that knew if he was involved in something – anything – there would be serious consequences. But how could Draco be up to no good, when _he_ was the one mysteriously showing up wounded and unconscious? Biting her lip, she looked back at his forearm, covered up by his sleeve.

"I need to go to Dumbledore," she adamantly told herself. "I'm Head Girl. It's my duty to report anything if there's even the slightest implication they might be in danger."

Firmly holding onto this reasoning, she gave him one last look-over to see if he was still unconscious. Then she grabbed her wand and headed towards the door.

Then something happened. She heard something. A word.

She whipped back around. "What did you say?" she said. But all that greeted her was silence. His body was so still it looked dead from where she stood. She swallowed hard, her thoughts in a mad scramble. She knew what he had said. She was absolutely positive. It was still ringing in her ears, furiously weaving through her brain, revolving over and over again to make sure she had _understood_. He had spoken to her. He had said it.

"_Fly."_


	6. Chapter 6

**A/N: **Thanks for reading and reviewing! You guys are so rad! I hope you guys can feel the tension rising because the next chapter it practically explodes. Like, all over our faces. And it's going to hurt but it's going to be so awesome.

**Chapter 6**

"_You learn to be content with your life because you realize it's the only one you're ever going to have," he said, sitting by her family's lake. "Flying away – it's just a dream. It's never going to happen. That's why it's so nice to think of."_

"Miss Blackwell?"

Hermione looked up at her Headmaster, trying to blink away the stubborn cobwebs of past memories. But in the back of her mind, that image of him, the glow of the sunset reflecting off of his young, flawless face, clung tightly – almost even with purpose. Though not often, the moments she'd had with Draco when he had mentioned this capricious desire to fly away from all the tangible elements of his life stood loud out and clear in her mind. She could almost even remember how cool and firmly he'd held her hand when they had shaken on the deal – that if she could overcome her fear of flying and heights, he would mount his broom and leave. Everything. Maybe even her.

"Madam Pomfrey has informed me that Mr. Malfoy will be fine. He has no serious wounds. Just a minor fainting spell, it appears."

Hermione had been at Hogwarts long enough to know when Dumbledore wasn't telling her the entire truth. Granted, it was something more of a fact – that Dumbledore was almost never telling them the entire truth, and usually all they could do was simply accept that, because they could rarely challenge someone of such high authority like Dumbledore. But something about Draco's case made her anxious enough for the truth to try and press her luck on it.

"Headmaster, forgive me but – this is the second time I've seen him like this," she insisted. "The first time, he had a mysterious head wound. I didn't take him to the hospital wing because he woke up soon after and acted as if nothing had happened."

A flash of that night came back to her. She didn't tell him another reason she hadn't gone to Dumbledore was because she was too busy wishing she'd left him there to die. In all of her intent to do good, she also remembered that all of the dark, shameful thoughts were a part of her, too.

She noticed Dumbledore's bright blue eyes darken behind his half-moon glasses. "And you didn't report this to his Head of House?"

She wrung her hands underneath the table. "I-I didn't think much of it, at first," she lied, sighing, diverting her eyes. "Until it happened again, tonight." She looked up and met his eyes again, firmly. "I don't think it's just a minor fainting spell, Headmaster. I have a very strong feeling there's something else going on."

_Something sinister_, she wanted to say. _Something sad. Something dreadful_.

Dumbledore considered this thoughtfully. "Have you noticed anything else out of the ordinary with Mr. Malfoy?" he asked.

"Well – no," she said, starting to become frustrated with her lack of evidence when she could see the invalidity of her conjecture increasingly being reflected on Dumbledore's face. "But my gut tells me something isn't right about Draco. Please, Headmaster. Tell me you'll look into it."

His eyes softened at her, and already she could feel that this was a losing battle. "Miss Blackwell, I understand there has been some unresolved tension between you two as a result of an unexpected turn of events last year. Mr. Malfoy will be kept here after he regains consciousness, where I will then question him. But you do understand that we have no evidence to initiate an investigation otherwise. To do so," he said somberly, "would be against Hogwarts policy."

Hermione sat back in her seat, suddenly feeling as if all of her energy had been drained from her. Her body felt spent and her mind was disoriented with drowsiness and the confusion over the night's recent events involving Malfoy. "Yes, Headmaster Dumbledore. I understand."

"Good," he said. "And I do appreciate you bringing Mr. Malfoy to the hospital wing and bringing his situation to my attention. I will do everything in my power to make certain he is not in harm's way."

Hermione nodded, thanking him for his time before exiting his circular office. As she left and headed back towards her room, silently making her way through the dead, dimly lit corridors, she couldn't shake the feeling that Dumbledore was hiding something from her, and it frustrated her. Didn't she have a right to know?

_No, actually, you don't_, her mind's voice harshly answered. _You're out of his life now, remember_?

As if it were that easy to stop caring about someone just because they had decided you were no longer worth any of their time or good intent. As if she could just turn it all off, all of those years of friendship and their associated memories. As if she could just as easily pretend none of it meant anything. As if she could be Draco.

But she didn't wish to be him – no, not with the way things were turning out. But right now she wasn't exactly enjoying being herself, either.

As she made it through the portrait hole to their common room, she stared again at his open door. She slowly walked in, turning on the lights. Everything there looked neat and perfectly in order, and it occurred to her that she wasn't sure exactly what it was she was looking for. Some sign of struggle, maybe. A sign of something terrible that would confirm her worst fear, as if he'd be stupid enough to put up a poster of the Dark Mark or leave out a private journal in clear view. She sighed, biting her lip, before heading over to his wardrobe. She opened the doors and quickly rummaged through his clothes. Nothing.

She began to search through his things, looking for anything that might give her a clue of what was going on, what he had gotten himself involved in. She looked even though she knew she would find nothing. Draco was impeccable about details. She would never find anything he hadn't meant for her to find.

She looked in a bedside drawer and lifted up a volume of _Hogwarts: a History_. It wasn't the common edition the school had them buy their first year here – it was one from his family's personal collection, a crisp first edition. She knew this because while her own library was filled with first editions back home, she had always envied him for this one. For a moment she was pulled from her spot and transported back in time, running her fingertips down the spine, tracing the depressed lettering. She closed her eyes for a second in an attempt to collect herself before she could possibly unravel. And then she opened it.

"_You've got an unhealthy obsession with that book," Draco said to her, looking at her oddly, as she leaned against the shelf with the tome tucked against her chest. "Granted, you've got an unhealthy obsession with all books, but that book in particular."_

"_You don't get it," she said, shaking her head at him. "It's history. Or a good chunk of it, at least. This is the very first edition of Hogwarts: A History. It's the largest one before they decided to edit out what they thought a bunch of First Years didn't want to bother with. It's utterly complete." She sighed as she flipped through it. "I've been trying to find one for ages, but a lot of them were destroyed in the first Wizarding War."_

"_So now your only resort is to come here to _my_ library," Draco drawled, "and salivate over _my_ copy. I'd say you're mental but this is perfectly like you."_

_She looked at him, before closing the book. "What kills me is that you don't even know what you have." A symptom of the obscenely rich, she'd realized. They saw objects and rare deluxe trinkets but nothing about what they could possibly mean to someone else._

"_Blackwell, let's forget for a moment that you're a woman and thus create irrational bonds to pieces of chocolate and sentimental objects," he said dryly, coming up next to her. "It's a book. I've got thousands of other 'historical' books, all first editions, too. So forgive me if I'm not paying this one special attention every hour of every day."_

"_It's a book," she clarified, "chronicling how four very different people came together from all paths of life and built a school whose values would live on for ages after their death. It's a book about immortality." She began to mutter to herself. "And the noble kind, not the villainous kind they write about in fairytales."_

"_Immortality," he said slowly, as if thinking it over. "I suppose that _almost_ makes it exciting."_

_She tenderly shoved the book back in its place on the shelf, rolling her eyes at him. Leave it to him to debase a sacred hobby like reading your favorite book. "You're a machine, you know that?" she said, turning to him._

_Draco only smirked. That same infuriating, condescending smirk that seemed so disturbingly natural for such a handsome face. She wondered if he had come out smirking that way from his mother's velvet womb or if he had caught it, like a disease, from his father before he even learned how to talk. "For everyone else, maybe," he teased nonchalantly. "But not for you."_

Realizing she couldn't bear to look over this book – not like she used to, not anymore, not right now – she decided to close it and put it away – but not before she noticed something. There was a pocket behind the cover that she would have surely missed if she hadn't spent summers pouring herself over this single book. She curiously slid her finger against it, trying to reach what was inside.

Finally, she was able to pull out what was in the hidden sleeve. She held her breath.

It was a photograph from a New Year's party that had been held at her manor, one year ago. She looked at the two moving figures in the picture, smiling and laughing in the crowd. She hardly recognized herself. As for Draco, she hardly recognized him, either – if it was not for the same Draco still living like a ghost in her mind. The same Draco she had been trying to convince herself was out of reach, hopelessly adrift in the darkness somewhere, he was here. He had existed. He was in this picture. With her.

Her fingertips curled against the picture, humanly anchoring it to this world, thinking that it would slip away from her or disappear as soon as she let go. Holding this physical proof of a time she almost thought she'd imagined burned her. She was trapped in a revolving daze that kept hitting her, over and over again, staring at that picture, impossibly trying to grasp what it could possibly mean. Because it meant something. Perhaps even something she couldn't bear to fathom.

When the terror of a forthcoming epiphany finally overwhelmed her, she shoved the picture back inside the book, and the book back in its proper place – inside the drawer, buried, and out of sight. Feeling as if she couldn't breathe, and as if the walls were now shrinking in on her, she left quickly and locked the room behind her, wishing she'd never been in there at all.

It was only later that night as she lay restless in her bed, rubbing away the saltwater in her eyes, that she remembered the pensieve she had seen earlier. She remembered it vividly, glowing blue and ethereally amidst the darkness in the corner, before she had found him unconscious on the floor. But when she had returned to inevitably find his family's first edition of _Hogwarts: A History _in his drawer, as well as the picture he had hidden inside it, she had surveyed his room again. The pensieve hadn't been there at all. As if purely a figment of her imagination, it hadn't even left a trace.

ooo

She remembered that New Year's party, perhaps too clearly than she wished sometimes.

Her parents held a New Year's social every year as part of their efforts to keep up with the people of the Pureblood socialite crowd. Every year since she could remember it had been extravagant, bombarded with champagne and wealthy adults that smiled as if they singlehandedly knew the secret to the world. It had always amazed her how seamlessly her parents could fit into this crowd, as if it was as simple as slipping into a second skin, the way they could sparkle and fit the persona they had moved to India to escape in the first place. She realized, after her sixteenth birthday, that the first pretenders she had ever known were her parents. They had taught her that lies were a part of getting by.

Draco could have easily ditched her to go with the others that had tagged along with their parents to the party (as the years went on, there weren't many), but every year he would show up and spend his New Year's with her. Some days they'd spend it cooped up in the opposite wing of the party, doing their best impressions of the people downstairs, having stolen a tray of desserts from the kitchens; or some days – if it wasn't cold enough yet – they'd spend it by the lake, toasting to each other as the clock struck into the New Year, then screaming nonsense into the dark oblivion.

This year, even though she'd had her doubts, he had shown up. Impeccable and in his dress robes – as if he had just stepped out of a Witch Weekly photo shoot, as usual.

"Thought you would be at the Greengrasses' New Year's party," she said to him, as he nonchalantly grabbed an hors d'oeuvre. People were starting to filter into their manor, oohing and ahhing over the glitzy décor and talking to her parents. She smoothed out some imaginary creases in her dress. "Seeing as how Daphne's your latest flavor of the month and all."

"Careful there, Blackwell," he smirked. "Starting to sound a bit bitter, are we?"

"Not in the slightest. I just thought I'd finally gotten rid of you, that's all," she said, aligning the dessert trays to distract herself. "Was getting ready to pop open the champagne to celebrate."

"Well, nobody gets rid of me that easily," he said haughtily, before pausing their conversation to mechanically greet a few passerby. "Besides, it's tradition. It would have felt wrong to have spent New Year's with anybody but you."

She looked up at him to see if he was still smirking that stupid smirk, but saw that he wasn't. He had meant it, what he'd said, and she quickly looked away, not quite sure of how she felt about it. She was almost even glad there were people around to greet and quickly edge the conversation away. As she made short small talk with some family friends, she could feel his eyes on her bare shoulders, making the skin there invisibly burn.

"I imagine Daphne wasn't too pleased," she said, as casually as possible, as she took a sip of her drink. She could still feel his eyes on her and it was unnerving her because she was starting to think her slight jealousy was radiating off of her in waves, and she was truly praying that it wasn't.

"Since when," he was saying to her, as they began to weave through the ballroom, slipping past the other warm bodies, "have you ever cared about Daphne being pleased or not? Or any of the girls before her? Face it. You care about them even less than I do. You actually laugh at their misfortune."

"I don't laugh at their misfortune," she corrected. "I laugh because taking up with you is the stupidest thing anybody could ever do. And the fact that they get their hopes up is further proof that our human nature is to contradict everything we know about ourselves." She turned to him, giving him a stern look. "Which is that people don't change. Especially if they're wealthy playboy prats."

He pretended to look hurt. "I thought you were supposed to be on my side."

"It's a bit hard to be on your side when you leave a trail of weeping, vengeful girls everywhere you go," she said, a bit coldly. "I get weekly Howlers from girls who make the tragic mistake of thinking that I'm your girlfriend. Just last week one singed off my eyebrows."

"To be fair," he said, trying not to look so amused, "your eyebrows have been needing work for quite some time now."

She just looked at him, incredulous. "And that's supposed to win me over. Brilliant. Quite the charmer of words, you are, Draco."

She excused herself and made the obligatory rounds at the party until she was sure she'd at least said hello to everyone before finally escaping upstairs. She opened the door to her room to find Draco laying in her bed, having picked up a book from the pile on her desk, quietly reading. She sighed silently to herself as she closed the door behind her, muffling the cacophony of the crowd.

So he had stayed, after all. She found some comfort in that.

"If you're bored, you can leave, you know," she said to him, nudging off her shoes and rubbing her tender, raw heels. "I am releasing you from any sense of obligation you might have been feeling by showing up here and not to the Greengrasses' tonight. So go. Fly away, bird. Be free."

He flipped the page, not even looking up. "You're not getting rid of me that easily. You insult me just by trying."

She lay down beside him, watching his face, which was perfectly focused on what he was reading. She could hear the faint music traveling from all the way downstairs. "You broke up with her, didn't you?" she said softly.

"In a sense," he said, after a long pause. "Yes."

"What was it about her this time?" she asked. "Was her nose too pointy? Her knees too fat? Her voice too shrill? Her breathing too loud?"

"Yes," he said, dryly. "All of those, if you can believe it."

She stared at him in awe. "Only you could find a flaw in the most beautiful girl in school. She made decent marks, too, from what I've heard."

He snorted. "You hated her. You told me yourself. You thought she was up her own arse and that she was ridiculous."

"So? I think that about all the girls you date. They seem to fit the same mold, as if they're all clones of each other. But she was better. A little, at least. You two would have made a decent pair, if you weren't so monogamously-challenged."

"And what about you?" he said, closing the book.

She raised her eyebrows him. "What _about_ me?"

"Exactly. Nothing. I seem to give you ample cannon fodder and you give nothing. You give worse than nothing. You give – negative space." He seemed oddly frustrated by this, and she cocked her head at him, trying to read why.

"I told you. I'm not going to get involved with just anybody."

She said this even though she knew her own parents were getting pressured to "debut" her out into society as part of some outdated Pureblood tradition. She also said this even though she was also aware of how some boys at school had begun to look at her – in double-takes, in seemed. None of it changed her mind.

"Don't you ever think," he said slowly, "that whoever this mysterious perfect man it is you're waiting for might never show up? And that years later, you'll look back on these prime snog-worthy years of your life and regret it?"

"Que sera, sera, Draco," she smiled at him, and he shook his head at her, smiling despite himself. "Besides, being with all those girls. . . don't you find it exhausting? You don't even like them half the time. Not as people, anyway."

When he didn't say anything, an idea crept up in the faraway corners of her mind. That maybe she was right, and maybe that was the reason he'd come here for New Year's, and not the Greengrasses'. And at that, she smiled a little bit to herself, letting out a tiny breath against her fingers.

"The truth is, I don't like most people. And if I do like them at first, I'm immediately suspicious of them."

She laughed. "That's only because you've got trust issues."

He looked at her, the right side of his mouth pulled upwards. "I trust you, don't I?"

"That's because you've got no choice. I know all of your dirty secrets," she said sinisterly, before the quiet crept in-between them and she realized the dark underbelly of what she'd said. That she did know most of his dirty secrets, and wished that sometimes she didn't. And when she turned to look at him again, she could see the somber expression he had, as if he were thinking the same thing – but different. Heavier. Always heavier with Draco, these days.

That was the funny thing about being friends with both Draco and Harry – two boys who swore like hellfire to hate each other forever. They had no idea – and would never care enough to listen – how much they had in common. Sometimes they would both get these dark, identical looks – like the entire world was on their shoulders. And as if they were so bone-tired and hadn't slept in weeks.

She knew things had changed for Draco at the manor because in the summer and during their Christmas holiday off from school, their visits became less frequent. He was always off busy with his father, or shagging some chit he'd happened to make eye contact with in the jewelry store. And when he was with her, she could sense the tension, as if he was wound tightly inside and he was trying to let loose around her. He could never do it all the way – not completely. In silent moments like these, she could see it all over his face, like a shadow that was pulling him in with either of them helpless to do anything to stop it. Her, especially. She didn't even know where to begin. How could she, when he would tell her absolutely nothing?

"Do you still do it?" she asked, softly. "Dream about flying away?"

There she was, struggling to hold on, when he was daydreaming about leaving it all behind. She wanted to be angry, to point a finger and talk about being so callous towards an advantaged life, but she couldn't. She couldn't because she knew him – because she understood.

"More now than ever, I think. But the more I'm tempted to, the more it feels impossible."

"Why?" she pressed, as gently as she could. She knew that this was a risk. That if she said or did anything wrong he would shut down completely. He was good at that now. Shutting down, not letting anyone in, bearing the burden by himself. It was such a tragic hero thing to do and it infuriated her.

"Has anybody ever told you," he said, getting up from her bed, "that you ask far too many questions for your own good?"

She sat up and watched him as he walked over to her window, looking out at the magical light display her parents had set up for the party, down at their lawn.

"It's only because I'm on the quest for truth, Draco, like any purpose-searching human being."

"Well, the truth is pretty fucking overrated, I'm sorry to say," he said bitterly. "You know that, don't you, Blackwell? That the truth is cruel and ugly. Tell me you do."

Her throat was dry. When he finally glanced over at her, she could only nod, her heart beating like a bomb inside her chest. Did he know about her? But how could he? No, it was impossible. If he knew. . . he would have told her. Or simply never have come to see her ever again. Cut her off like an infected limb, even. At least that's what Lucius would have demanded.

She got up to stand next to him, watching the people down below. They were laughing with their mouths open to the sky and there was a band playing with fairy lights in the trees, turning colors. She wondered how happy they were. Then she wondered how ugly their secrets were, too, and if it sat heavily inside them, waiting, like a tumor – even when they were dancing, forgetting, and happy. She wondered if she had more in common with them than she'd ever thought.

"Draco, there's something I have to tell you," she breathed, not looking at him. Instead she focused on the moon she had clear view of from her window. She wanted to live there, where secrets like hers didn't matter. But when she looked up, mentally preparing herself to tell him, rehearsing the words and lining them all up on her tongue, all the while wanting to transcend her secret and him to transcend this life – the only life he'd ever known – he had quickly stepped up, overtaking her petite frame. Then he kissed her.

"Kissed her" was an understatement. She hadn't known kisses could really be like this – yet in some bizarre way, it was what she'd been hoping it would be, all along. Soft and tender but pulling her in and getting his fingers urgently tangled up in her hair. It spanned infinity yet was altogether too short that by the time she had pushed him away she was out of breath and her mind was spinning like the planet in rapid regression. Her knees felt flimsy, like windblown paper – but so did every other part of her. Like she was half in this world and half above it, floating.

She stared at him, his lips swollen and his eyes dark like wet stones. Her pulse sounded like white noise in her ears. There was a gauzy shimmer all around them that made all of this seem too much like a dream.

"What," she breathed, "was that?"

He just looked at her for a few moments, silent. She wondered if he was desperately trying to gather up his scrambled thoughts just like she was – but he didn't seem anywhere as flustered as her, and it scared her. "Nothing," he finally said. He ran one hand through his hair, moving to turn away when he looked back at her again, his mouth gnarled into an annoyed scowl. "Does everything always have to mean something to you?"

"Nothing," she scoffed, the luster of the moment quickly disappearing. She had left the orbit and dazedly landed back on earth now. Hard. "You think that was _nothing_."

_Nothing_. She never thought any other word could feel so much like a punch in the stomach.

"What do you think it was?"

"Well, I can hardly say, can I?" she said, her voice rising. "_I'm_ not the one who attacked your mouth."

"Oh come off it, Blackwell. It was just a bit of fun. It's New Year's, for Merlin's sake," he said, a little coldly that it stung her. "Little did I know you'd want to dissect it to pieces – if I'd known that, I wouldn't have even considered it. Honestly. Just let it go."

"So I've become one of those girls then," she said stubbornly, her words quivering slightly. "The girls you don't take seriously, that you like to kiss or shag just for fun because they mean nothing to you." She felt her eyes get hot, clenching her fists against her stupid silk dress. "Fuck, Draco! Is _nothing_ sacred to you? Does everything always have to be about sex? Does everything always have to be so-so – _disposable _and meaningless?"

She saw the immediate reaction from her words on his face, flashing like lightning on stone. "What the bloody hell is your problem?" he snapped. "It was one sodding kiss. Forget about it, all right? Just pretend it never happened."

"Right," she said back at him, wishing she could vomit her words into physical things and pelt them at his head. To make him feel something. Anything, for anyone else. "Like it's that easy."

"Get off your high horse, Blackwell," he hissed, passing her. "I'm not the only one who fucking pretends around here."

And then that was it. With a slam of her bedroom door, he was gone. And she cursed at him with her lips still tingling.

ooo

The first time she saw Draco again after the incident was on Monday, halfway through their classes. She took little glances at him while they prepared their supplies, trying her best to read him – his face, anything – but there was nothing. He practically radiated frost, which, unfortunately, was his normal ambiance. All she wanted was for there to be a little sign that something was off, because she knew with all her conviction that something was. She just needed to be right. She just needed a little proof it wasn't just _her_.

She bit her lip. He hadn't even looked her way since class started. Not once.

"Oy, Hermione, you all right?" Dean asked her, as he finished grinding up the fluxweed. She turned back to their work, feeling her cheeks flush. "Something going on? You seem. . . less focused than usual."

"Sorry, no, just a little distracted," she said, turning the page, taking a breath. She tried to herd her scrambled thoughts together, fading out the image of Malfoy in her mind. "What's after grinding the fluxweed? Oh, right. Chopping up the mandrake root."

He handed her the root. "Things still going okay with Malfoy? You know Harry and Ron get worried about you having to work with him. What with everything that happened last year, and all."

Hermione forced a smile at him as she began slicing through the mandrake. "Malfoy's just a little more than an inconvenience, that's all. In the shape of an utter prat – but I can handle myself."

Dean nodded, not looking quite as convinced but taking her cue nonetheless, and for the rest of the class period they concocted their healing potion to success. If Dean noticed her looking a little more relieved than usual at their potion turning out the correct hue, he didn't say a word – and she let out a sigh of reprieve when Snape finally announced the end of class. She started quickly gathering up her things, wanting to catch Malfoy in the hall.

Draco was out of the class before she was, followed by the rest of her peers, but just as she had hurriedly crossed towards the front of the class to head out the door, she heard her name. Her stomach sank as she slowly turned around, cursing under her breath. Even as Head Girl, she had not yet transcended their group's collective dislike for Slytherin's Head of House.

"Miss Blackwell," their Potions Master drawled, his upper lip curling with distaste at her name. "I understand you are responsible for admitting my student to the hospital wing last night, in his. . . unfortunate state."

She adjusted her satchel strap, watching him warily. "That's right. I am."

He just looked at her for a moment, completely silent, unnerving her. She could feel him trying to gauge what she knew. "Let's not pretend here, Miss Blackwell. Both you and I have been closely associated with the Malfoys at some point or another, and I know your character as well as your little friends from _Gryffindor House_," he said with revulsion. "I'm only warning you once. Stay away from Draco. I can sense you sniffing around like a little vermin."

She narrowed her eyes at him. "It's a bit hard to stay away from him, isn't it? Seeing as how he's Head Boy and all. Seeing as how we've got to sleep one room away from each other, which makes me privy to all of the suspicious things he's involved in," she went on, defiantly.

After years of pretending – first that she was someone she wasn't, then that she was okay when she wasn't – she was fed up with it. She was going to push the envelope. She was going to make him as uncomfortable as possible as he threatened her with his authority. She was tired of tip-toeing, most of all around someone who didn't deserve the courtesy.

"As usual, exhibiting your typical Gryffindor insolence." His beetle-black eyes flashed. "Listen to me closely, Miss Blackwell, and listen to me well. If you're as clever as you think you are, you'd stop poking your nose in things that don't concern you."

"Perhaps you didn't hear me, Professor," she said, firmly. "If it concerns the Head Boy, it concerns me. So either you get him to step down and mysteriously faint in somebody else's common room, or you convince Dumbledore I'm not doing my job as Head Girl. I'll leave you now to make that decision. Good day."

And as she turned on her heel to walk out, folding her trembling hands into tight fists, she could swear she caught a glimpse of him shaking his head from the corner of her eye as she left the classroom.

As soon as she was far away enough, she pinned herself into the nearest hidden alcove and sank against the wall, struggling to breathe against the reality of who was really behind Draco's destiny. That perhaps he hadn't done all the leaving – she had left him, too, at a time when he needed her the most. And that now…

She sighed, closing her eyes.

… It was very possibly too late.


	7. Chapter 7

**A/N: **Try not to hate me too much after you read this, you guys. Also, I've just recently come across Ellie Goulding's "I Know You Care" which is an AMAZING song (ahem soundtrack ahem) to this fic.

**Chapter 7**

She had missed her opportunity to talk to Draco for the rest of the day until their Heads patrol later that night – but even that was starting to look like another dead end when she noticed he hadn't even bothered to show up to lunch or supper in the Great Hall. She sat there at Gryffindor table like a tightly-wound metal coil, her eyes constantly watching the giant wooden doors, only to look down at her plate towards the end of the meal to realize she hadn't eaten a bite of it at all.

It was funny how any and all efforts of trying to tell herself that her worrying was a waste of time, seeing as how Draco was a complete arsehole and her good intent wasn't being appreciated on either sides of the spectrum – but she was past trying to talk herself out of it. Hermione knew a hopeless case when she saw one. She just never predicted she'd ever look in the mirror and see one looking right back at her.

By the time she and her friends finished up dinner, gathering up their things to begin heading back to their rooms, Ginny had moved herself right next to her.

"It's Malfoy, isn't it?" she whispered, as the boys in front of them began an enthusiastic conversation about the latest professional Quidditch match.

Hermione only pursed her lips, giving Ginny a look. Ginny nodded somberly.

"Just be careful, all right?" she told her, her voice in a low murmur and easily getting swallowed up by surrounding conversations. "He's hurt you enough."

Before she could think up an answer, they had already separated ways – Ginny going along with the rest of the boys back to the Gryffindor dorms. Hermione thought about what she'd said and sighed, making her way to the Heads rooms. There she knocked on Malfoy's door, knowing he wouldn't be there to answer her. She was right.

She waited for him for their partner patrol, but when twenty minutes passed their curfew and he still hadn't shown up, she decided to go on without him. She walked their route without her usual attention to detail. She found a few stray students, hidden in an alcove or two and engaged in a heated snog, whom she dismissively warned and sent on their way. But whenever she found herself in a place where the shadows outreached the light, she looked harder, as if she was expecting him to step out of them any second now.

The end of their patrol usually took place in the Astronomy Tower. She lingered there for a few minutes afterwards, needing the fresh air and trying to find some way to pacify her thoughts. She would never admit it, but the fear and worry had begun eating her up inside like a cancer. It made her restless and unhinged. She could feel it messing with her insides, twisting her in knots, filling things with lead, sucking the marrow out from her bones. That was what darkness did. It emptied you out just so it could fill you back in.

She was about to leave when she heard footsteps, and whirled around to see Draco, having just gotten there. She stared at him, feeling her heart clench and her back straighten.

"You're late," she said through her teeth, as he neared her.

"I was with Snape. I owled you, but apparently you didn't get the memo," he said coolly.

"Snape," she scoffed. "Right. Has he got a message for me, then?"

"Hell if I know. Do I look like your sodding messenger?"

She knew better than to believe his glacial tone of detachment. She could see that little vein in his neck, the one that bulged out whenever he was straining himself.

"I checked the corridors on the way here, and they were clear. So I announce that tonight's Head patrol is over," he said, before giving her a little sneer and starting to turn away. But Hermione knew her chances of getting him alone and that they were slim – having obviously been warned by Snape – so she reached out, digging her fingers into his elbow, and swung him back around.

"Tell me what's going on, Malfoy," she said, firmly but calmly. "I know you're messed up in something. Whatever's going on with you – you can tell me."

"Don't make me laugh, Blackwell," he snapped at her, his ash-colored eyes flashing, snatching his arm back from her grasp. "As if I could ever be tempted to disclose any of my secrets to _you_. And – by the way, keep your fucking good intentions to yourself, all right? Nobody appreciates it. Especially not me. You keep waving that thing around, you're going to poke somebody's eye out with it. So fuck off."

She planted herself in her spot, never once taking her eyes off of him. "Why did you have a pensieve in your room, Draco?"

His entire body froze.

"It was there, when I found you," she went on. "Then when I went back later that night, it was gone."

His voice was hard and through his teeth. "You don't know what you're talking about."

"Draco," she said again, softly. "Tell me what's going on. I want to help you. I need to know the truth."

"Oh, you need to know the _truth_, do you?" he laughed, the rough sound of it scratching the hollow of his throat, like a shovel grating against asphalt. "You _want_ to help me? Does it seem like I _care_ about what you want, Blackwell? Does it look like I'm here to do _your_ bidding, to take care of _your _wants and needs just so you can sleep at night?" He vehemently scoffed at her. "I don't know what that badge has done to you, but you're overstepping your boundaries and you best step off if you know what's good for you. Go back and crawl into your little mud hole where you belong."

She didn't move. She was used to this. Him degrading everything that came out of her mouth – every move, every thought. It was like he wanted to suck the air out of the room and the oxygen straight out of her blood, the way he hovered over her, ready and waiting to pounce. But she knew what it meant when there was someone who made it their job to make you miserable. It meant they had something to protect. Something big.

"I'm not going to let it go. Snarl and threaten me all you want. I'm not intimidated by your stupid Slytherin parlor tricks. I want the truth, and even if you're not going to tell me, I'm going to get it."

And that was it. As soon as she finished talking, the air changed. He whipped around, his eyes ablaze, his face alive with rage.

"And what about what _I _want?" he shouted at her, his palm smacking hard against the stone pillar behind her, making her flinch. It rang in her ears like thunder. "Huh, Blackwell? What about what _I_ fucking want? Does anybody ever ask me that? You stand there with your sad fucking eyes and your stupid badge and your quivering lip, poking around in everything like you're humanity's big fucking doe-eyed favor to the world, and I can't _escape_ you, can I, even when all I want –" he said, before abruptly stopping, mid-sentence. He locked his jaw, forcing a slow, hard breath through his nostrils. "All I _want_ is for things to go back to the way they were. But that can't happen, can it? Because of _you_. You're a Mudblood – no, worse. You're a liar. Just like everybody else. You're a fucking liar."

His eyes bore through her like fire-tipped swords, singeing her synapses and vaporizing her thoughts. Slowly, agony was beginning to gurgle up his throat and bleed out into his voice like an open wound, and she could make him out underneath the layers of stone, trying to resist it.

"I trusted you," he hissed, "and you conned me."

She felt dizzy. From his nearness. From his words. She caught an image of him in her mind – him years ago, lying down on her bed, hours before the clock struck midnight and thrust them into the New Year. His beautiful, careless face smirking at her, taking her breath away. _"I trust _you_, don't I?"_

Her voice was deep, coming from someplace that ached and begged for him to know better. "You know I didn't con you."

"Oh, I _know_ that, do I?" He took a sharp breath that sliced through the muggy, throbbing air, and she watched his broad chest step back, as if retreating – but he wasn't, because a second later he was back, snarling in her face, mere inches away. "Do you know how _tempting_ it is, sleeping one room away from you, day by day, knowing how _easy_ it would be just to sneak into your room while you were asleep and just make you _disappear?_"

She closed her eyes, feeling his hot breath moist on her face. "Why didn't you do it then?" she whispered, swallowing hard. "Make me disappear. If I'm so _repulsive_ to you. If you can't even stand to look at me."

Something fell over his eyes – almost as if he was stunned. His expression twitched with familiarity before another wave of hostility shook his body, and he pushed off of the pillar and stepped away from her with a loud, agonizing scream that muffled through his clenched teeth. She stared at him from where she stood, terrified with her knees hopelessly locked but unable to look away. In her fuzzy, whirling head, her only coherent thoughts were: _Come back to me. You're better than this._

"Why can't you just do us both a _fucking favor_ and just _stay away_?" he said to her, at the top of his lungs. She could see the faint veins in his neck bulging from his intensity and emotional fervor, his teeth bared like a rabid dog. He had finally broken free from his malicious reserve and instead looked wild and feverish, like he was being ripped apart at the seams. "Why can't you just be smart for once and _leave it alone_?"

"Because I can't. Because I—"

"Don't," he warned, whipping out his wand and pointing it at her, making her flinch. "_Don't_ say it, Blackwell."

"I care about you!" she yelled, her heart wanting to leap out of her chest. It wanted to go far away. To the moon and beyond, to nothing. "_There_. Is it really such a surprise, Draco? Maybe you're heartless enough to forget about it, but I can't. I've tried and _I can't_. So I _can't_ leave you alone. Not for you to ruin your life. Not now. Not ever."

"You _care_ about me?" he echoed violently, tossing his head back and laughing, so harsh and rough that she winced, and it rebounded off of the stone walls, hitting her in resounding levels and layers, grating away her skin. "Fat lot _you_ cared, leaving me with the rest of the world to find out about your _little secret_." He spat it like it was steaming poison. "So don't waste my time with meaningless sentiments. Save it for someone stupid enough to believe you."

"You want to know why I didn't tell you?" she shouted at his back. "Because I knew what would happen! I thought about it, every night, and I saw what would happen if I did. This. I knew it would all happen _just like this_," she said, wildly motioning around her, her vision blurry. When she licked her chapped lips it tasted like metal and salt. "So fine. Hate me for not telling you. But all I wanted was just to pretend for a little while longer – because once you knew, I knew you would leave." She paused, watching him, as his chest heaved up and down with his hand still tightly wound around his wand. "And I was right, wasn't I? You left. The first moment you got, you left."

For a moment they just stared at each other. She felt as if somebody had doused the air with gasoline and she watched him, not blinking once, impossibly trying to read his mind. Here, in this tower, with just the two of them – she felt as if they were the only people left in the world.

She wanted to see guilt. She wanted to see even the most miniscule trace of the hurt she felt. But most of all, she wanted to see one last remaining shred of humanity – a tiny spark that would let her know hope was not all lost.

"I thought you'd be happy," he said, his voice shockingly collected. He was composed now, tucking himself back in where he might have spilled out. Locking it all up, like he was so good at. "That's all you ever wanted, isn't it? To be right."

"Not here." She shook her head. "Not with you."

"Well, I guess we can't always get what we want." He kept his eyes on her, slowly dropping his arm. "Can we, Hermione?"

Her voice cracked with desperation, full of water. "It doesn't have to be this way. We don't have to hate each other. We don't have to play this game."

For a minute he resembled those marble statues she remembered from his family's garden. Soulless. Silent. He didn't say a single word, his face only hardening, muscles rising and lines deepening. She watched him like the moon in phases.

"You don't get it, do you?" he finally said. "You and me – we're pawns. We don't get to decide whether we play or not. We play, or we die."

She felt it – the sobs invading her body, like a spinning punch from the inside of her chest, over and over again. She took deep breaths, trying to hold them back. But she could feel it, covering them like an elusive dark cloud – defeat. Hopelessness. And she was fighting with all she had but she could feel herself getting tired and wondering if there was any point to it, any point to it at all.

"We die anyway," she told him, her mouth filled with bile.

She shut her eyes for a moment and leaned against the pillar to steady herself, to keep herself from crumbling the way she knew she would, messy and uninhibited and against all of the vows she had made to herself, but when she opened her eyes again he was in front of her and grabbing her, softly but firmly, his lips grazing the burning trail of her tears. And she fell apart in his arms without questioning it because for once he was here and he was real and he wasn't telling her that everything meant nothing and that she was wrong. And she sobbed into his shoulder, wishing she could form words, like that she missed him and some days felt that she would give up everything just to get him back. And that she was sorry, she was _so fucking sorry_, and she was hurting too but that she didn't blame him completely for it, no, for that she blamed the world, too.

He murmured something into the cusp of her ear, his own voice salty and trembling, but before she could draw back and ask him what he said, she felt something cold against her temple where his lips had just been.

And his voice was so sad and in his throat. It sounded like yesterday and today and a million years from now. It sounded like a thousand nights spent alone.

"_Obliviate."_

ooo

It was ten seconds to the New Year, and Hermione Blackwell was sneaking out of her own manor with a wine bottle in one hand.

She could hear the chants of the people, happy and alive and hopelessly drunk out of their minds, as they counted down and she sat herself down by her family's lake, popping open the bottle and cursing under her breath. She heard the crescendo of the shouts and watched the whizzing fireworks burst above their property on cue, forming shapes and fizzing away into spurts of glitter that illuminated the dark, bitter night.

She took one generous gulp of wine before leaning her head back against the tree, watching the voluptuous moon above the lake, whispering to it a happy new year. As her lips puckered against the bottle, tossing her head back for another drink, she tried not to think of what else her lips had touched earlier this evening. She tried even harder not to notice the way the tiny hairs on her arms stood straight at the thought of it, like little soldiers, barking for her attention.

"That prat," she muttered to herself, along with a few other words she'd heard others refer to him with casual regularity. She sighed and then tucked the bottle against her, thinking of how she had almost told him. Her secret that turned her insides black and boiling and dirty. She tried to imagine, for the hundredth time, how he would have reacted to her words. In her mind she had always tried to go against her instinct and make this imaginary version of him stay – and to embody all of the things she knew he would not. But even though she wished for this Draco – the Draco that would stick by her despite her blood – he was almost like a stranger, warped and unreal. As if she had taken his face and his body and hollowed him out – the bad attitude, the smirking, the inner turmoil – and she couldn't see herself being happy with it. She had grown too attached him too well to be happy with the comforting lie.

It occurred to her, sitting by the lake, that this was her first New Year's she had greeted alone. She told herself to accept this. Someday everybody was going to find out about her, and this would be the new normal she would have to face.

She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, taking another swig.

She didn't know how long she was out there, trying to pick through her thoughts and feelings of sadness and anger, trying to drink it all away as if her world were to end tomorrow. But in the middle of it all, she heard faint movement behind her, just barely eclipsed by the echo of the music. And she didn't have to look up to know it was him.

"I'm sorry," he told her. "I should have never kissed you. Not for those reasons. You're right. We're better than that."

She should have felt relieved by this. Draco Malfoy hardly ever owned up to anything. Apologies were simply not in his blood. The Malfoys had made a career out of making other people apologize to _them_, not the other way around. But all she could feel was this sickening pang in her stomach that slithered all the way up to her chest and sat there, making it hard for her to breathe.

She kept her eyes hard at the lake. "I just don't want anything to change," she said, her voice so low and soft she thought he might not have heard. She wondered if he heard the heaviness behind it, the ugliness waiting to spill out.

"They won't," he replied. There was something in his voice, an artery of sadness that cut through the pulsing reassurance, that made her look up. He sat down next to her, the contact of his body pleasantly warm and making her shiver. "Happy New Year," he said to her.

"Happy New Year," she said back, trying a smile. She handed him the bottle and he took it, silently, taking a drink.

They sat out there until the sky was beginning to lighten, calling back the stars, and the music died down. The entire night she had thought of reaching for his hand, needing some kind of tangible reassurance, because she had an indescribable, dark feeling about this year. Like things were going to rupture open and fall fantastically apart.

But she never did because she was just so, so afraid.

ooo

The next morning, Hermione woke up with sore, aching eyes. She rubbed them and winced, groggily getting out of bed. She noticed an owl on her desk – one from last night. Draco writing to her to let her know he wouldn't be making it to their patrol. She couldn't even be that upset about it – after the terror he'd been, she was relieved he hadn't shown up. For once, she'd had a peaceful patrol not being used as somebody's verbal punching bag. It was perhaps one of the most peaceful nights she'd had since she'd been appointed Head Girl. She had returned from her solitary patrol and then had fallen asleep reading.

She tossed the letter into the trash and then went on to start her day.

* * *

Please review! Even if it's to tell me you hate me and will never read any of my work again because I'm a sadist and a terrible person because I torture my readers that I claim to love so much, etc.


	8. Chapter 8

**A/N: **A thousand apologies for the delay of this chapter but it's totally intense. Or at least the end is. So stop reading this already. God.

**Chapter 8**

The energy surrounding the Welcome Back ball was palpable. Dumbledore was right – from the initial dull surprise emerged a rippling wave of excitement inside the castle walls as the event inched closer and closer. As she scurried around finalizing and re-touching arrangements for the big day, she heard titters and laments from the halls and dorms. The corridor fires burned a little brighter, people smiled a little wider, and there was a fresher air wafting around them that often coincided with breaking tradition. Even Hermione, with all of her focus on making sure everything would go smoothly, felt this.

She had one word for it: pressure.

"Relax, Hermione. You're running around like a chicken with its head cut off," Harry said to her. He pulled out his supplies from his satchel, randomly placing them on the table. She frowned at the state of his quill – bent and obviously neglected. She was glad to know the quill box she had gotten him last Christmas was being put to good use – collecting dust in his trunk somewhere.

"Not that it's any different from how you usually are," Ron commented. "But you nearly trampled a first year the other day hurrying off to send an owl. It's not like you."

She looked at both of her friends, before they all broke into a fit of laughter. She leaned back into her seat, sighing, rubbing her eyes. She could feel all of the tension in her body leaving her, little by little, the oxygen starting to trickle back into her blood. "God, I'm exhausted. I can't wait 'til it's all over. All week I've been having nightmares about what could possibly go wrong tomorrow."

Her voice fell softer at this, hesitantly trailing off. She had thought about telling Harry and Ron about her recent dreams, but didn't think she could find the words to describe them. In them, she was always in a crowd, trying to run, but seemingly blocked by other, slower-moving bodies that didn't budge against her pushing and pleading. A thick, churning cloud of darkness was threatening to overtake the room. She couldn't run.

In the end, she always woke up right as the ominous wisps of blackness were reaching her, breathless with terror.

"It'll be perfect. You're worrying over nothing," Harry was saying. "It's not like you're capable of anything less."

She flushed, the intense residue of her nightmares slowly ebbing away.

"Yeah, and if anything does go wrong," said Ron, "you can be sure no one else is going to blame you anywhere near as hard as you will."

She rolled her eyes before getting up, slinging her satchel strap onto her shoulders. "I'll keep that in mind, Ron," she dryly said to him, before bidding them good night and heading out of the library.

She walked the empty, shadowed corridors, shifting her fingers against her bag, sighing at the thought of tomorrow. Everything seemed as if it was going according to plan, though she couldn't help but heed the worry threading through her. It reminded her of how her mother would often claim she sensed storms before they hit. "Something in the air," she would try to explain. "Like the air is heavier, and full of electricity. You can even smell it, sometimes."

She used to fool herself into thinking she had inherited this gift from her, this sort of sixth sense for disasters. But this was before she had found out the real reason why her hair's shade of brown had never really matched her mother's, and even longer before her friends had ever convinced her bad gut feelings were usually just symptoms of her over-analytical nature.

She was shaken out of her thoughts when she looked up and met eyes with Draco, who had also just arrived at their common room. Her steps slowed, her heels sinking to the ground. He let his gaze linger on her for a brief second, his face absent of its usual scowl but still stony, before heading inside. She watched as the door closed behind him with a soft click, and stood there with her feet against the plush carpet, as if waiting.

Things had been different with him lately. Gone were the aggressive putdowns – his iciness now coincided with the cold sting of detachment. They had gone from jumping at each other's throats to dull passing glances that confused her more than anything. From an outsider's point of view, they could have mistaken it for near-civility. Not her, though. She could feel something underneath his frigid silence, something bulging and growing.

There were even times she swore she could see it, a glimpse of something, the way you could sometimes catch things in the corner of your eye – but gone always before you could turn your head and tell it to stay.

ooo

Sometimes she looked down at the finger that had been cut open by the rose's thorn, all of those years ago. She inspected it, rubbed her thumb against it, in awe of its smoothness. She remembered how gruesome it had looked that day, even now, as if her finger had ruptured open to an angry, red mouth. It had always amazed her how the smallest wounds seemed to bleed more excessively than you thought they ever should. Even after Draco had slid his tongue against the torn skin, cleaning it, it had continued to bleed, ribboning down to the waiting soil. She had even been struck by the strange beauty of it, the blood so jarringly crimson and bright against her pale, freckled skin.

Eventually she had gone back to her mother, who had cleaned it up with a spell and magicked it away so thoroughly it hadn't left a trace. Not even a tiny sliver of a scar. It looked as it did before, virgin and pink, as if it had never opened up to expose its underneath, as if a boy so unaware of blood politics at the time had never tried to keep it from profusely bleeding out in the most primitive way.

And now, as she inspected it underneath the moonlight from her window, she wished she had let it heal on its own. That it had scabbed and left something for her; proof other than her own memories. Memories could be distorted and changed. Even now she was beginning to doubt the authenticity of her own memories, the way you remembered only what you wanted to or what had burrowed itself deep inside your mind; the way the mind could be so sinisterly selective and easily influenced. And for a second, she hated magic. She hated that it could erase things so cleanly, without so much as a single pang of remorse.

How could she have known, standing there in front of her mother, that she would have wanted it? That she should have begged for a scar? That someday it would stand for innocence and the goodness of the past that seemed so impossible to hold onto now?

ooo

The next day, Hermione arrived at the Great Hall just after lunch to make sure set-up was going smoothly for the night. She hadn't slept much the night before, having woken from the same pervasive nightmare. Despite overall confirmation about the big event, she had arrived flustered and feeling out of focus, her eyes scanning wildly. The prefects were there, their wands raised, helping with the decorations. Tables were being moved, exposing the gleaming floor. Somewhere, someone was tinkering with the Great Hall's ceiling, changing it from one sky to another, exposing vast, arresting galaxies to darkness speckled with miniscule twinkles.

Snow was just beginning to fall from the ceiling when she saw Malfoy across the way, dressed in a black luxury jumper and slim trousers, talking to a man – the manager, she assumed, of the band she had hired to play. She averted her eyes before he could catch her staring, heading towards the prefects, making the rounds.

Eventually, she found herself by Ginny, who was directing a small crew of other prefects on the placement of the tables.

"Don't take this the wrong way," Ginny quietly said to her as the circular tables glided across the floor, "but you look like you've had better days."

"I'll just be glad when all of this is over," Hermione sighed. "I haven't been sleeping so well."

"You worry too much, Hermione. It'll be flawless, you'll see. Your dignity as Head Girl will be cemented once you see how brilliant everything will be." Ginny grinned at her. "Now go and take a nap. Everything's handled. You've done your part."

ooo

She watched the expressions of those entering the Great Hall, sipping from a glass of punch. The awe and thrill reflected on their faces, glowing girls in extravagant dresses on the arms of nervous boys in classy dress robes, the cacophony of compliments and laughter. It reminded her of the parties back home when everything seemed to take on a certain shimmer, as if so far detached from the dull, ordinary colors of day to day reality. Parties and balls had always inhabited their own dimension. People were different. Even the air felt different.

"You did it," her housemates were telling her. "You pulled it off."

"The night's not over yet," she said to them, taking another drink.

"Bloody hell, Hermione," Ron said. "Just enjoy it, will you? Just look around and enjoy the fruits of your crazed labor. It's stunning. Just admit it."

It _was_ stunning – that fact was undeniable. Along with the students, swarms of Hogwarts alumni and benefactors had also attended. As she counted them, she couldn't help but notice that it was likely every single one of them had come. That had been Draco's job, and he had pulled it off. They looked jovial mingling with the Hogwarts professors.

Just as she was looking around the room, she happened to see Draco through the shifting crowd. He was dressed impeccably, of course. Next to him was his date, Astoria Greengrass, dressed in a pretty navy silk dress, her hair charmed in luxurious curls. Draco had always had the uncanny ability to select the most genetically perfect girls, exaggerated even more so when he stood next to them. She stared at them, unable to deny the faint unfurling in her chest of loathing. How many times had she witnessed this exact scene – him with a pretty girl – looking fated for each other? Countless. But still, even now, it made her mouth taste like metal.

It reminded her that some things from their past still persisted despite how their relationship had warped into something unrecognizable. There were still echoes of how things used to be.

As if he had sensed her thoughts, he looked up, catching her gaze. Instead of looking away, as if now made more confident from her success, she kept her eyes on him. She wanted to see who would look away first. She wanted to see if he would let something slip, a clue as to why his behavior had changed so suddenly, from actively making her life hell to back to pretending she didn't exist. Had he given up from trying to make her step down from Head Girl? Had he realized he was wasting his time? Perhaps he thought now that she wasn't even worth his cruel putdowns or his simmering glares.

Maybe she was no longer an object to hate. Maybe now she was just an annoying gnat that hovered around, a nuisance. Or maybe she was not even that. Maybe she was nothing.

She expected for him to stonily turn away, as usual, but he surprised her by beginning to head towards her, not once moving his eyes away. She blinked, setting her empty drink down. Then something moved into her view – someone. She found herself face to face with a smirking Cormac McLaggen. She had the urge to swat him away like an annoying fly.

"Cormac," she said.

"Blackwell," he said coolly. "I see you've come dateless."

She feigned a smile. "I decided it was best."

"A shame. You would've looked gorgeous on any man's arm," he said, to which he aided with a generous look-over of her body. Hermione rolled her eyes. "But I've come to you to apologize for the way I treated you. And, to ask you if we could just let bygones be bygones." He handed her a glass of punch, smiling. She took it, hesitantly, watching his face, waiting. "And to make the humble request of a dance with you before the night ends. Just one. I'll be a gentleman. I promise."

Somehow she highly doubted that, but she could see Malfoy nearing them behind him, so she quickly agreed. With a bow, he walked away, clearing out the space in front of her. She took generous gulps of her punch as Draco passed in front of her, heading out of the massive doors. She set down her glass and followed after him.

She waited until they were far enough that it was unlikely they would be overheard by any passerby, alone in some isolated corridor, their shadows stretching and moving; enacting scenes they had yet to play.

"What are you doing?" she called out to him.

He sharply turned around, his jaw clenched. "What do you mean?"

She swallowed, her palms beginning to moisten against her dress. "You're different," she said, her words falling limp, rolling out of her mouth, as if confused. As soon as she said it, she regretted it. She was hit by sudden amnesia of why she had ever followed him out here in the first place, wanting instead to turn around and walk away and question the pull she had felt towards him in the Great Hall. Her feet had followed him without a single afterthought until now, until she heard how stupid she sounded, how undignified.

"Something's not right with you," she went on, despite her frustration. "Just tell me, so I can stop thinking about you. Then I'll leave you alone."

She hated how desperately her voice gurgled out of her throat. Something flickered in his eyes, and for a minute she thought he was deflecting her, not hearing a single thing she said.

He neared her, his shoes faintly clicking against the floor. His eyes were dark and shadowed. "You shouldn't be here," he said to her, his voice low and serious, and she felt dazed in her confusion. His scent wafted over her, and she felt dizzy from nostalgia. "I wasn't sure of it before, but I'm sure now. You need to get out."

She blinked. "What?" she said. Her own voice sounded a million miles away.

"Just trust me, Blackwell."

She scoffed. Her throat burned. "_Trust_ you?"

For a second it occurred to her that she thought she had been seeing the old him – as if time had forgotten its linear motion and had rippled backwards, smudging its ancient constraints.

"I don't even know why I came out here," she muttered, stepping away. The dizziness was washing over her, and she turned away, heading back. He was yelling after her, on her heels, but she couldn't hear him. A white noise had begun to roar in her ears.

"Don't," he was saying. "We'll get out of the castle. Hermione!"

He had just grabbed her when she reached the Great Hall. There, in the presence of everyone, he let her go, as if he'd been burned.

In the Great Hall, fast music was playing. Colorful bodies were swirling together. Faces melted into one another. Hermione felt short of breath. Then, suddenly, the music ended and there was an announcement. Dumbledore was talking, and suddenly she heard her name along with Draco's, and everyone began to cheer. Somewhere behind her, someone was patting her on the back, commending her. She looked down at her elbow; it tingled where he had grabbed her just seconds ago, telling her to listen. Had he followed after her? She didn't know. Her mind felt scrambled, intoxicated, and confused. When she looked up, everything had begun to run together like waterlogged paint.

_We'll get out of the castle. Hermione!_

In the crowd, somewhere, was Cormac, closely watching her disoriented expression, his wiry lips smirking against his glass.

What happened then seemed to happen in a matter of seconds. Everything darkened, leaving them all in absolute darkness. There was a half-second of utter, shocked stillness before she heard people spring into motion, professors chanting spells with their wands glowing while the students began to murmur in panic.

When the room was again flooded with light, the slowly escalating noise of panic vanished in a chokehold of petrified silence. Hermione could barely keep herself up, her vision swaying. But when she finally lifted her eyes to where everyone was staring in complete fear, she felt her body go cold.

There, to the front, where two bodies were hanging, strung up. Their skin the sallow, unnatural hue of death, limp and heavy, dressed in the clothes they had been killed in. She knew better, however. She knew better than to think they had been merciful enough to simply kill them. No, even in her state, she could see the symptoms of torture. The blood-crusted fingernails, the sickening way she could tell their organs were not in the right places, the empty holes where their eyes used to be.

Eyes that had once looked at her with love and acceptance. She had memorized those eyes: one pair a haunting slate blue, another a warm brown with faint flecks of green. They had been hollowed out, like the insides of a walnut. Two sets of empty sockets looked at her now.

When the first scream was heard, piercing through the muffled bubble of horror, she almost thought it had been her. It wasn't. Her terror had blocked her airways and dismantled her completely, mute but already falling apart, screaming on the inside but her physical body fossilized in time, paralyzed in shock, unable to do anything but stand there like a tombstone, staring at the bodies of her parents, her parents hanging from the ceiling with their eyes now mere voids, their bodies battered shells, bloody letters carefully engraved across their foreheads and arms that spelled: DEATH TO ALL BLOOD TRAITORS.

And then there was chaos.

* * *

(I know this is probably the worst chapter to bring this up but) Vows has been nommed for **Best Alternate Universe fic** over at the **HP Fanfic Fan poll awards**! It's a total honor and a million kisses to whoever nommed it. There are a ton of amazing fics up for nomination, so feel free to read and vote! You can access the link on my bio page.


	9. Chapter 9

**A/N: **I got some reviews talking about how I killed off Harry and Ron, so I need to clarify: her parents were the two bodies strung up in the Great Hall, NOT Harry and Ron. Harry and Ron, as you'll see in this chapter, are alive and just fine. I mentioned it a few times at the end of the last chapter that it was her parents, so maybe we need to read a little more closely. I love you anyway though. Hence the super-duper quick update! AND I'm in the middle of finals so let that be a clue of how much I love you. And how I'm the worst procrastinator ever.

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**Chapter 9**

There's a place that exists beyond time, immeasurable and unshareable - a canyon at the edge where infinity gets to have a face, where memories are sown like seeds to grow roots, heavy roots, which could withstand time and human flaws and bad decisions and do so with grace. A place where loved ones lived on after the physical world turned on in their absence, not blinking once. A place too sacred for time.

It explained why she saw her parents again just after she had seen them strung up in the Great Hall, displayed as gruesome warnings to her and her peers, young people full of ideas and optimism about the future, trapped inside a dark room like blind cattle. She didn't know how, but she had lost her grip and slipped into the misty in-between of time and memory and life and death, and she had seen them again, alive and happy. She watched their eyes as if they would rot away in their sockets within seconds, transforming into gleaming beetles and worms. But this was it, the snow globe, the amberized moment in which her parents would stay exactly the way she wanted them to: young and perfect. In her memories, they would not fall victim to the life cycle or to the withers of old age.

When she saw them, they didn't say a word to her. All they did was just stand there and look alive and make her feel like they loved her, and it was enough.

There are a few thoughts that go through your head when you realize the people you thought would live forever, whose arms you'd always be able to run into, are gone. Like that the world was so incredibly unfair and cruel. And that no matter how long you lived, you would never get an explanation, or a reason, for catastrophes. But the one thought that stood loud and clear in her mind, the one that absolutely gutted her, was how she had wished she'd been able to tell them, one last time, how much she loved them.

She thought of all the words she had used up in her life (words like "parchment" and "library") and how few she'd ever used the one that was the most important. And she didn't know how she could have possibly known but she still should've, anyway. She was the brightest witch of her age. That was the point. She just should've fucking known.

ooo

She woke up to the stark whiteness of the hospital wing ceiling, her head throbbing and lips so dry she could taste their salty ridges against her tongue. She looked down at her body to see that the skirt of her dress had been ripped, its frayed remains limp against her legs, from what she guessed to be the panicked mob from the Great Hall. She remembered how the crowd had surged all at once, feet and limbs and frenzied bodies crashing into one another, screams bounding off the walls, blind panic electrifying the convoluted air.

At one point she had no longer been able to keep her balance and stumbled. She braced herself, knowing for a fact that she would likely be trampled on, her fear causing her knees to lock and preventing her from getting back up quickly enough – until she felt a strong hand grip her and pull her up by the elbow and then around her waist, his face shadowed but blurred, her head spinning. "Come on," he'd said to her, and he held her to him and pushed through, while she fought to keep conscious.

She'd said Harry's name even though she knew it wasn't Harry. She could smell him. She knew that smell. It traveled with her all the way back to her memories. In her mind there flashed an image of fat roses in bloom.

If he heard her above the terror, she didn't know. He didn't say anything more. It wasn't long after that, catching a glimpse of his serious and stricken face, when she finally slipped into unconsciousness.

When she looked around, she realized there were others in the beds beside hers, bruised and battered. She felt an unexplainable flush of shame, watching them, before she heard the furious clicking of heels and saw that Madam Pomfrey was heading her way. Her lips were pressed together in a line so fine they practically disappeared.

"Miss Blackwell," she said. Her eyes flickered over her in inspection. Hermione almost wanted to applaud her. She only saw a faint wash of pity in her eyes. "How do you feel?"

"I feel fine," she said. Her hoarse voice cracked and she grabbed the glass of water beside her, taking thirsty gulps. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "Where is he?"

She didn't wait for her to respond. She was already throwing off her covers.

"Miss Blackwell, you're in shock. You're not fit to be getting out of bed yet – you need your rest—"

Her knees buckled and she reached out to hold onto the side table for support, accidentally sweeping the glass aside. It shattered on the floor. The faint rustles of movement ceased. She could hear the deafening silence of a watching audience.

"My parents are dead," she said. Somehow the words felt empty, foreign, and yet to sink in. "I'll rest when the Dark Lord is, too."

Her response was halfhearted. "I understand, but—"

"Poppy, let the girl go." She didn't have to turn her head to know that her Head of House had appeared behind her. Her voice sounded tired, not the stern tone she was used to in her classroom. "Albus asked for her."

Madam Pomfrey nodded, albeit hesitant. "Watch her."

"Undoubtedly," McGonagall said. Hermione straightened and followed after her, glad to be away from the watching eyes. She just half a step ahead of her, in easy reach in case something happened to her – but still, she was glad for the distance. She didn't want to see the look on her face. Already, she was tired of the pity.

"Mr. Potter and Mr. Weasley wanted to apologize for not being there when you woke," she said. "They're both waiting for you in Albus' office."

"What about Draco?"

She said nothing for a long while. The rhythmic taps of her heels – still dressed for the party – punctuated the air between them, like the ticks of a clock. "Mr. Malfoy is fine. He's been detained," she said. "For questioning."

It occurred to her that she should not have been thinking about Draco. That she should have been thinking about her parents and have been too busy falling apart to think about how he had found her in that impossible crowd, how his unyielding grip around her had been so tight it was almost painful, helping her keep from passing out. And how, even now, she was replaying the scene in the corridor before everything had happened. _You shouldn't be here_. _I wasn't sure before, but I'm sure of it now._

Things were adding up, but some things weren't.

One thing she knew for sure: her parents were dead. Thinking about them wasn't going to bring them back. She had to focus on the living. She had to, or she knew she might fall into a dark place she wasn't sure she could crawl back out of.

They said nothing else until they reached Dumbledore's office. There, she found Lupin and a few other members of the Order, looking serious and deep in discussion. They walked in right as Harry was in mid-speak.

"He drugged her. Madam Pomfrey said herself she'd been drugged!"

His face was flushed with anger. Ron, having seen them come in, pressed his hand on his shoulder. "Mate, she's here," he whispered, and Harry's head whipped around to her. She could see the tightness of his jaw and the wildness of his eyes.

"Hermione," he said. "How are you feeling?"

"I feel fine," she said.

"You should come and sit down."

"I'm fine standing." She felt a distance between them she wasn't sure how to read. She had seen Harry like this before – countless times, it seemed. But she hated the way the air changed in the room when she walked in, as if suddenly everybody was holding their breath, watching her carefully, waiting for her to fall apart. "I'm fine," she said again.

Harry knew what it felt like to lose people, perhaps more than anyone in the room. He couldn't even look at her for more than a few seconds.

"Who drugged me?" she asked, meeting eyes with the people in the room.

"Malfoy," Ron spat. "It wasn't just shock, Hermione. Madam Pomfrey said your symptoms were caused by a disorientation potion."

"It couldn't be. I hadn't even spoken to him all day."

"Whether you spoke to him that day or not, it still doesn't change the fact that he wants you dead. You said so yourself, Hermione," Harry said.

"I never said that," she said, her voice raising a little.

"Hermione, he was in charge of who came in and out," Lupin said calmly. "Had he been working with someone, with a mind like his, not to mention his resources, it would have been fairly easy to orchestrate it."

There was the smallest hint of underlying sadness to what he said, as if Remus hadn't wanted to believe it, either, but that the facts were undeniable.

"He was dragging you out when we found you, Hermione. You were gone by then, unconscious. He was taking you somewhere, away from the crowd, away from where we were supposed to be," Ron said. "Probably to the Death Eaters."

She shook her head. Her mouth felt fuzzy. "That still doesn't prove—"

"_He did it_, Hermione," Harry suddenly said, yelling at her, surprising them all. "Why can't you understand that? If you don't believe us, then go see him for yourself. He's already admitted to it."

A tense silence befell the room. She stared at Harry. She could count, on one hand, the number of times he's ever yelled at her like this before. Ron was looking away now, to his feet. As she stood there, she felt something hot and bile inching up her throat. In a room full of people who genuinely cared for her, she had never felt so alone.

Dumbledore had just started talking when she ran out of the office.

She was only able to make it to the hall before she doubled over and vomited. It went on for a few seconds, tears streaming down her face, sobbing to herself. Even when it was over, she held herself there, wishing it were that easy.

How did they get here? She asked it over and over. How did things come to be, how did tragedies happen when you least expected them? How did the people you loved change into people who wanted to hurt you? How did it all happen before her very eyes? And how could she not have stopped it?

When she wiped her eyes, Harry was there. He cleaned up her vomit from the floor with a spell. She shakily helped herself up. He didn't touch her.

"I'm sorry about your parents," he said to her, his voice still hard. "I shouldn't have yelled at you like that." He paused, his voice softening. "I should never ever yell at you like that."

He was angry with himself. She didn't say anything.

"I know you're still hung up on the Malfoy you grew up with, but he's not that person anymore, Hermione. People change. You know this. I know there's a possibility you might not be able to accept this until you hear it for yourself. But I want to prepare you for it." His voice got quiet, almost a whisper. "I wish this didn't have to happen to you."

She used to believe in good things. She believed in it more when she'd found out about her parents, and how they had adopted this abandoned little Muggleborn child and loved her like their own. She wanted to believe that good still existed, despite the claims of it long being dead.

She realized then what they pitied her so much for. For a girl so smart, she was so unworldly and naïve. She had yet to learn the hard lesson that goodness, in these troubled days, was a myth.

ooo

There was a time when she used to think she knew a lot about the world. That she thought she had come to a good balance between reality and illusion, when her childhood was waning away to the hazier and more confused times of adolescence. She thought she had grown wiser through her books and watching Draco battle his inner demons. She thought she could understand through simply observing and listening and asking the right questions.

It was mad, she thought now, just how young she was.

She gave herself some time to recuperate before she asked to see him. She thought she needed a clear idea of what she was going to say to him. So when no words seemed to align with her emotions, she asked to see him anyway.

They led her to a room cozier than the dungeon cell she had pictured him being held in. There was a couch and table with a pitcher of water and a tray of food. When she entered, she could feel the vibration of magic all around, holding him there, knowing without being sure that if he were to try to leave, he would find himself right where he started. Comfortable as it all looked, he was still a prisoner.

Snape was there when she came in. She wasn't surprised. He narrowed his eyes at her in the usual way, and in his low nasal voice greeted her, before leaving them to be alone.

Draco watched her, his face unreadable. His collar was crumpled, his tie missing, dress robes nowhere to be seen. He was perfect even when he wasn't. Already, she hated him.

He looked away, staring holes into nothing.

"Is it true?" she said. "Tell me."

He didn't. She walked over to him in two long strides and struck him across the face, the sound of contact cracking through the air. He didn't flinch. She felt tears starting to burn her eyes and silently cursed at herself for being so weak at the time she most needed to forget what weakness was.

"Answer me, Draco," she said through her teeth. "Tell me. Did you kill my parents?"

She needed to know if her disbelief was stupid. She needed to know if her lingering faith was madness.

Finally, he raised his eyes back at her. So dull and gray, like the sides of an old coin. "Does it matter if I didn't?"

Her lungs burned. Her hand itched to strike him again. When she spoke, she saw tiny bits of her saliva scatter into the air like doves. "You know it does, you bastard."

"Don't be so fucking naïve, Hermione. You think Potter ever asked me if I killed your parents? You think he asked how? You think he was open to anything other than what he already thought?"

"You admitted it. He told me you did."

"I admitted it," he said, "because he wasn't going to hear anything else."

She stared at him, trying to swallow down the thorn in her throat. He didn't move in his seat. For an infinite minute they just watched each other, and she tried her hardest to read him – to discern the truth from the lies; the tenderness from the cruelty. His face, all angles and sharp lines now; a skeletal bearing of the Draco she had met in the garden.

"I feel sorry for you. You're so much weaker than you'd ever feared you'd be," she whispered sadly.

Confusion flickered in his eyes before he glared at her, his mouth curling into a familiar scowl. She was just turning away, blinking away her tears, unsure of the agonized wheezing of her heart, when he called after her. The odd strain of desperation in his voice caught her attention.

"Do you think I killed them, Hermione?" he shouted at her. "Do you think I did this? Forget about your idiotic Gryffindor cronies. Do you think I murdered your parents?"

"I don't know. I don't know you anymore, remember?"

There was a beat of silence, heavy and throbbing. Her bitterness waved between them, like a flag. "I didn't kill them. I didn't know. Not like you think."

"But you knew _something_," she said, clenching her hands, frustrated with the contradictions he was giving her. "You told me, out in the hall—"

"I didn't kill them," he only said again, before he began to yell, his voice turning hoarse and frenzied. "I didn't fucking kill them! I didn't know! I didn't kill them!"

Suddenly, the door in front of her opened. Snape's black robes rippled into her view, and she felt a hand on her shoulder, yanking her away.

"I made a vow to your parents," she heard him say, behind her. "I promised them I'd keep you safe, no matter what."

And then the door slammed, shutting him away from her view.

* * *

Drop me a line! Did this chapter do anything for you? Is Draco a goodie or a baddie? Is Harry being a total douche? Let me know! Also, you know, flattery never gets old. Just FYI.


	10. Chapter 10

**A/N: **Hello beautiful souls! A thousand apologies for not having finished this chapter sooner – trust me, I tried. But while you're berating me, I should let you know that I have a big exam tomorrow and numerous papers due that I ignored (and will probably perish for later) in order to finish this chapter. This is a bit of a heavy one because it mainly deals with Hermione coping with her parents' death, and there is a disappointing (but understandable! Come on guys, her parents just died!) lack of D/Hr interaction. But! Next chapter should make up for it! So read on!

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**Chapter 10**

"There's a problem I have with you and your friends, Blackwell, and it's that as big of fans you are of justice, you lot are the biggest group of sniveling hypocrites I've ever seen."

She jerked away from his iron grasp, ramming her spine against the wall. Her eyes were still on the door behind him, Draco's words still echoing in her ears, scrambling her thoughts. Her pulse pounded erratically in her ears.

"What did he mean when he said he made a vow to my parents?" she breathed, finally shifting her eyes to Snape, who was looking at her with his typical revulsion.

"Think very hard, Head Girl," Snape snapped at her. "What do you _think_ it means?"

She shook her head, shutting her eyes tight. The ground tilted under her feet and she anchored herself against the wall. "But he—"

She couldn't find the words. She thought of the cruel things he'd said and done and the unmistakable hate that simmered in his eyes every time he'd looked at her. A whole year and then some of treating her as if she were lower than nothing, of deliberately filling her life with misery. How could that be true? How could he possibly be telling the truth? How could have it all felt so agonizingly real – if it was all just pretend?

Her knees felt weak.

"While everyone else finds your naivety endearing, Blackwell, I've lost patience for it. Do us all a favor and release us from the obligation of having to explain everything to you by promptly growing up." He narrowed his beetle-black eyes at her. "We all have parts to play, some easier than others. Your poor Draco was handed the short straw. You understand that little Muggle saying, don't you?"

She stared at him. Her chest felt full of hot air, almost to the point of pain. Answers and questions and even more questions whirled inside her brain, desperate to find a point of connection, futilely scurrying to make sense. A flash of her parents' bodies in the Great Hall flickered in her mind. Her knees buckled.

She caught herself in time and turned away, violently retching, bracing herself against the wall. It was painful – she barely had anything in her stomach, and what little came up burned her throat. She shut her eyes tight, wiping her mouth on her arm and feeling the wetness on her cheeks, trying to find a point of balance. "It's the shock," she explained weakly, before magically cleaning it up.

"Be appreciative. Run back to your little friends and tell them to conjure up some sense," he drawled snidely.

She glared at him through blurry eyes. "And I'm supposed to believe you?" she scoffed.

"For fuck's sake." He roughly grabbed her by the arm. "Come with me."

He took her into his office, deep inside the dungeons. He let her go just as he had closed and locked his door, before raising one pale hand above his cramped bookcase and inaudibly whispering a spell. Slowly, the bookcase parted down the middle, exposing shelves of large glowing bottles. There must've been over two dozen of them, neatly lined up. As she stood there, taking this in, she knew exactly what they were. Pensieves. And she had never seen so many in her life.

He picked a nameless one from the upper left corner, twisting it open and using his wand to pick out a single silvery, shimmering strand.

"His pensieve, that night he fainted," she said, quietly, the realization dawning on her. "You were the one who came and took it."

He barely glanced up at her from the pensieve. "His memories are more valuable than yours and Potter's combined," he said. "They require protection."

He summoned her and she hesitantly stepped forward, keeping her suspicious gaze on him. "Your proof, Miss Blackwell," he murmured, as he pressed the tip of his wand against her temple. Taking a steadying breath, her eyes fluttered closed.

ooo

Cormac McLaggen was summoned to Dumbledore's office for questioning. It took less than three minutes and just one threat of Veritaserum before he finally confessed.

"All right, it was me, okay?" he said, beads of sweat dripping down his wide forehead. "It was me who drugged her. I slipped the potion into her glass of punch before I gave it to her."

"Why did you do it?" Hermione hissed.

"Because I wanted revenge on you for turning me down to be your date for the ball. You humiliated me. I wanted compensation. I had planned for the effects of the potion to kick in while we were dancing. That way, I could offer to take you up to your room and we could have a bit of fun."

He licked his lips nervously.

They all stared at him. Ron lunged at him. Dumbledore was slow to reprimand and Harry was even slower to pull Ron off of him.

"You big sack of scum!" Ron raged. He had gotten a good chunk of his collar. McLaggen looked close to fainting.

"I'd say you're a disgrace to the McLaggens but we both know that isn't true," McGonagall said dryly. "Expect an expulsion, McLaggen. A suspension if you're lucky, and if your parents are infuriated enough to process an appeal. Either way, you won't be seeing these halls again for a very long time."

"What about her parents?" Ron demanded.

McLaggen paled instantly, shooting up from his seat. "Now wait a minute! I had nothing to do with that freakshow! I helped with the decorations, that's it! I had nothing to do with…" His face turned an unnatural shade of green. "Oh, Merlin. I think I'm going to puke."

While McLaggen was taken away by his Head of House to be properly dealt with, they all sat around Dumbledore's office. Ron, red-faced from rage, was still cursing under his breath.

"There's no way he could've done it," Hermione said. Had she any energy, she would have marveled at the way her own voice sounded so empty. So detached. Every part of her felt drained, yet despite Madam Pomfrey's advice about getting some sleep, she refused. She was afraid of what she would see in her dreams.

"As twisted as he is, and as absent his morals are," she continued, "he faints at the sight of blood."

"It doesn't mean he didn't help string them up," Ron snapped.

Hermione tried to meet Harry's eyes for backup, but he was avoiding her gaze. Ever since she had come in telling them about Draco's unbreakable vow to her parents, he had maintained his distance. It bewildered her why Harry wanted Draco to be at fault so much for something so terrible. Was their rivalry so intense it had come to this? That he wanted Draco imprisoned for something he didn't do? Or worse: that he had actually wanted him to be the one to have done it?

Suddenly, Harry stood up, coldly informing them that he was going back to the boy's dormitory to get some rest. Ron apologetically followed suit.

"Try and get some sleep, Hermione," Ron gently said to her, gingerly patting her on the shoulder, before they were both gone.

She sat there and stared at the ground until she felt hot tears pricking the back of her eyes, suddenly feeling angry with Harry. She avoided thinking about the insurmountable grief that threatened to incapacitate her, both physically and emotionally, for a very long time, but in the silence it proved difficult. Whenever she closed her eyes, all she could see were her parents. She continued to feel waves of nausea and shock despite having run out of contents to throw up. She was so tired even her bones ached.

In the corner, Fawkes let out a quiet croon, preening his feathers.

She looked up at Dumbledore, who was silently watching her. "You knew about Draco. Why didn't you say anything?" she said, her voice edged with anger. "When Harry was on his tirade about how he'd done it, about how he'd confessed – why _didn't you say anything_?"

"Because you were the one who had to do it, Miss Blackwell," Dumbledore said quietly, in that infuriatingly sage way he always did. She hated his composure. Her parents had just been killed. Even though she was irritated with Harry, at least he'd had the decency to express the desire to inflict bodily harm on whoever it was that'd murdered her parents and put them on display in the great hall. Though Dumbledore's demeanor was obviously grim, she wanted more from her Headmaster who had demanded so much of her within this past month.

"You had to be the one to find out for yourself. And you had to be the one to tell Mr. Potter and Mr. Weasley, as well as the rest of the Order."

In times of great distress and exhaustion, she found the irrational and impulsive side of her difficult to ignore. Her throat was tight with emotion. Her eyes burned, and from behind them she could feel the throbbing emptiness. She had cried plenty. Or perhaps not enough.

"But why?" she asked, frustrated. She wanted to ask how Dumbledore could claim to love his students and sit so calmly in his office while people died. Sirius and members of the Order and, now, her parents. Did he feel nothing? Were the deceased just collateral damage? Was he really so used to death?

"Because you would have always wondered," he answered. "And you would have never really known." He looked at her through his half-moon spectacles. "He doesn't need _me_ on his side, Miss Blackwell. Why else would he have done all of this?"

She was staring at something beyond him. Beyond the castle walls, beyond the demanding constraints of her own dark and churning present reality. Suddenly she was back by the glistening lake of Blackwell Manor, having just found out about her true birth, looking at Draco, who, even in his quickly fading innocence, was smiling back.

Even now, even in her immense anger and bitterness at him, all that had transpired, and was still, she felt a lonely sense of nostalgia, and the desire to go back to that moment. She would stay there. Happily and ignorantly, she would stay there.

"This is about you," Dumbledore was saying, his voice weaving through her thoughts. "He needs _you_."

ooo

Hermione stared at the miniscule pile of possessions the Medimorts had found on her parents. After thoroughly making sure they had not been cursed with Dark magic, they had given them to her, neatly obscured in a black leather pouch, along with a bottle of Dreamless Sleep potion, courtesy of Madam Pomfrey. Somewhere along the night she'd forgotten she must not have been the first to be terrified of sleep because of trauma, yet the fact that many others have had to see their loved ones' murdered bodies didn't dull the agony she felt pounding against the back of her skull.

They had asked her to come by to confirm that the murdered bodies had, in fact, been Mr. and Mrs. Blackwell. Madam Pomfrey and her Head of House had accompanied her. She tried everything she could to mentally prepare herself for a closer look of her dead parents, and as she stood by their lifeless bodies, colored by bruises and internal bleeding, she managed to let the Medimorts know that they were her parents. She shocked herself at how toneless she'd answered – so unlike the screaming she could hear within the confines of her own brain.

"We found a few possessions on their bodies," one of the workers let her know. "Their wands, some jewelry, and a piece of parchment." He handed her the black bag. "They've all been tested negative for curses or Dark magic."

She took it from him, feeling the solid weight of it in her hand. "What were their last spells?"

The Medimort looked up at her, shocked. "Excuse me?"

"What were their last spells?" she repeated, monotonously. "I know it's part of your job to check. So what were they?"

_Did they fight back? Did they see it coming?_

"I'm afraid that's confidential," he said. But she saw his pity flicker in his eyes, and with hesitation, he subtly checked over his shoulder before bowing his head and lowering his voice. She could tell he was new at this, unused to death and having to deal with the grieving. She watched the other, more experienced Medimorts in the room – their faces blank, their eyes hard and unflinching, acting with purpose and nothing else.

"From both wands, there was an abundance of spells fired within the last 24 hours," he whispered to her. "Many were of a defensive nature."

She closed her eyes, and she felt him step away. "Thank you," she said softly, not knowing whether he heard her. When she'd opened her eyes, he was gone.

When Hermione went back to her room, she had set the pouch on her desk and sat down on her bed for some time, just staring at it. Finally, she got up and gently emptied it out: her mother's necklace, her father's antique family ring, their wands, and a folded piece of parchment. Hard to believe this was all she had of them now. She traced her finger against their wands, still trying to keep up the barrier from breaching emotional collapse. She could imagine her parents firing off spell after spell, trying to fend off whoever had come to murder them. She wondered if they had been together. She wondered how long they had fought before they were captured. She didn't let herself wonder past that.

She could feel her body shaking, her passageways tightening, cutting off her air. Her fingers trembled as they picked up the parchment, and her stray tears slid over her knuckles, soaking the torn edges. When she finally unfolded it, she recognized the handwriting to be in her mother's handwriting.

_Our beloved Hermione,_

_You are our single most precious gift in this world. Nothing in the world could change how much we love you. Never doubt this. You are our daughter. You have made us the luckiest parents in both realms._

_Always,  
Mum and Dad._

Hermione sunk to her knees on the carpet. She cried until her fatigue finally overtook her and she had no choice but to sink into the darkness, again an orphan, aching and helpless.

ooo

She would never get used to the feeling of being in somebody else's memories. There was an unshakeable feeling of extreme unease – she felt like an intruder and that at any moment they would see through her, despite her supposed invisibility. But it never happened.

She was transported into a dark, dusty place, crouched behind something that smelled like rotten wood. She squinted, trying to adjust her eyes to the darkness. After a few moments, she could finally make out three cloaked figures in the room, just a small distance away. They were speaking in hushed tones.

"You can imagine our surprise when we received your message." She recognized that deep and distinct voice anywhere. Now, knowing that she would never hear it again, it made her heart ache. It was her father. "But…"

"Obviously you've shown your devotion to wanting to protect Hermione," a female voice whispered, obviously serious yet perplexed. She focused her eyes on the hooded figure to the right: her mother. "And we are grateful beyond words…" Her voice trailed off hesitantly.

"You must know how this puts you in great danger," her father spoke. "We would never ask it of you or anyone else. Venitia and I – we knew from the very beginning about the risk we were taking. This is why we must ask you if you are undoubtedly sure you want to do this."

"You don't have to," her mother said. "We brought her into our lives knowing we would have to do it alone."

"I wouldn't have called you here if I wasn't sure," said the third voice. Hermione felt the hair on the nape of her neck stand rigid. She peered through the murky darkness. Suddenly, a stray beam of moonlight filtered through a small foggy window, allowing her to confirm her suspicions. Nevertheless, she still felt her breath catch. It was Draco.

Her parents nodded, understanding. She remembered how even they had known the darkness of his life. Over the years, it had become easy to guess. And yet… they trusted him.

She caught herself then. How easy it was to forget, sometimes, that she would have trusted him with her own life, too, not so long ago.

"If you're sure," said her father.

Draco said nothing, instead raising his arm. Under the faint light of the moon, Hermione watched as he rolled up his sleeve. Her mother, seeing this, did the same. They clasped hands, their arms pressed against one another, and her father enacted the spell, the interweaving bond glowing and lighting up the room.

"Do you, Draco Lucius Malfoy, vow to protect Hermione, under any and all costs, for as long as you live?"

His voice was hard, full of something she was afraid to wonder about. She clenched her fingers against the hard ground.

"I vow it," he said.

"Then it is done," her father announced. The bond faded to a dim shimmer and flickered out, pulling them back into the shadows. Hermione heard her pulse racing in her ears, taking in what had just happened. "The Unbreakable Vow. It is done."

She only had a second more to catch a glimpse of Draco's stoic face underneath his hood before she was suddenly and violently pulled out from his memory, the white noise of the time tunnel drowning out her father's voice, the scene before her falling away, back into nothing.

* * *

Please review! You know how I so love hearing from you. Does this clear anything up? Does it dig up even more questions? Let me know!

P.S. I couldn't find a reference for whether JKR already had an "occupational name" for the wizards/witches who come to collect dead bodies, so I made up Medimort. It's lame but that's because I'm not JKR.


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